Octen, a search infrastructure startup focused on AI, said it has emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding anchored by Australian venture investor Square Peg.
The seed round also drew participation from Argor and a group of AI scientists, according to materials released by the company and its investors.
Octen, which is headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, is building a real-time search layer designed for AI agents and large language models, whose need for fast, structured information differs from that of human users browsing traditional search engines.
The new capital will be used to speed up product development, expand developer adoption, deepen enterprise partnerships, and grow its engineering and developer relations teams over the next 12 months, per the announcement.
The startup said its distributed search engine can handle more than 1 million queries per second on a single account, with a median latency of 62 milliseconds and real-time indexing that updates data within five minutes of publication.
The company was founded by Kuan Zou, who previously led AI search at Alibaba Cloud for more than five years, helping build systems serving hundreds of millions of users, and earlier built Baidu’s enterprise search platform from the ground up.
“Octen is built specifically for AI systems. Instead of mimicking a human browsing experience, it gives agents direct, high-speed access to the information they need,” said Zou.
Square Peg, which led the funding, said it sees Octen as building infrastructure for a new wave of AI-native search. The firm said traditional search systems were designed for humans and were not built for the speed, concurrency, and structured output that AI models require.
