Octen Closes $10M Seed Funding Round

The company has used the funds to expand its global server system and grow its engineering and developer relations teams across its two main locations.

Octen, based in San Francisco and Singapore, is building a global data search system designed for the agent-driven internet, with high-speed performance and accuracy to replace traditional human-focused search systems.

AI search has very different technical needs than traditional search for humans. An AI agent can run hundreds or thousands of searches simultaneously to complete a complex task, enabling it to research, verify, and combine information much faster than older search systems.

Since launching just three months ago, Octen’s Octen-8B model has topped the RTEB benchmark, beating leading competitors in accuracy and handling long data inputs, setting a new standard in data search. Its engineering teams in San Francisco and Singapore have also built a large-scale distributed search engine that raises the industry’s performance level.

Zou has over 10 years of experience building and scaling large search and AI systems. Before starting Octen, he led AI search products at Alibaba Cloud, serving hundreds of millions of users, and earlier built Baidu’s enterprise search platform from scratch. He has brought together a team of engineers and AI researchers from companies like Meta, Google, TikTok, Alibaba, Baidu, DeepSeek, and Xiaohongshu to build a global data search layer for AI agents.

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"For AI, concurrency and latency are the core foundational capabilities," said Kuan Zou, Founder and CEO of Octen. "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."

Tushar Roy, Partner, Square Peg, said: "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 assembled an impressive team with extensive experience building systems that power search at scale, with high 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."

About Octen

Founded in 2025, by Kuan Zou, Octen is a search platform built for the generative AI era. It offers a real time search API designed for AI agents chatbots and other automated applications. Unlike traditional search engines, Octen provides fast, structured and up to date results that integrate directly into AI workflows making it easier for developers without requiring them to build their own search systems.

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