Octen announced the launch of its web search API designed for the “agentic internet,” alongside the completion of a $10 million seed funding round led by Square Peg.
The company is positioning its platform as a next-generation search layer built specifically for artificial intelligence applications, where autonomous agents execute large volumes of concurrent queries to complete complex tasks. Octen’s infrastructure is engineered to meet these requirements, delivering sub-100-millisecond latency and handling more than 1 million queries per second.
Unlike traditional search engines optimized for human interaction, Octen’s system is designed for machine consumption, enabling AI agents to retrieve, process, and act on real-time information at scale. The company’s distributed search engine includes a trillion-scale, multi-language index and supports continuous data updates, allowing AI systems to operate on current information rather than static datasets.
Octen also highlighted the performance of its proprietary Octen-8B model, which recently ranked at the top of global retrieval benchmarks, demonstrating strong precision and long-context understanding.
Founded by Kuan Zou, a former leader in large-scale AI search systems at Alibaba Cloud and Baidu, Octen has assembled a team of engineers and researchers from companies including Meta, Google, TikTok, and Alibaba. The company operates with dual hubs in San Francisco and Singapore.
The seed funding has been used to scale Octen’s global infrastructure and expand its engineering and developer ecosystem. The platform is currently in invitation-only beta, working with design partners across the generative AI ecosystem.
The launch reflects a broader shift toward infrastructure tailored for AI-native workflows, where speed, concurrency, and structured data access are becoming critical components of next-generation applications.
KEY QUOTES:
“For AI, concurrency and latency are the core foundational capabilities. AI interacts with information in a way that is light-years beyond human capability. An agent can process thousands of data points simultaneously, which places a massive technical burden on the underlying stack. By solving the challenges of sub-100ms latency and million-level QPS, Octen is enabling a new milestone in AI applications by allowing agents to reason over the live web with the same speed and fluidity as memory.”
Kuan Zou, Founder And CEO, Octen
“Search infrastructure was built for humans, ranked by ads and formatted for people to browse. That doesn’t work for AI. Octen is building the search layer that is faster, cleaner, and purpose-built for how AI consumes information. What drew us in was the team. Zou has put together an impressive team with extensive experience building systems that powered search at significant scale, throughput and reliability. They are among the best in the world at what they do, and we’re excited to be partnering with them as they build Octen.”
Tushar Roy, Partner, Square Peg
