Octen Raises $10M in Seed Funding to Speed up AI Agent Search Queries

Why It Matters

By delivering sub‑100 ms latency and million‑level QPS, Octen removes a key bottleneck for AI agents that need real‑time web data, accelerating the rollout of more responsive, data‑driven applications across industries.

Key Takeaways

• Octen raises $10M seed round led by Square Peg
• Built AI‑optimized search engine delivering 62 ms median latency
• Supports >1 million queries per second per customer
• API enables parallel query fan‑out for faster data retrieval

Pulse Analysis

Artificial intelligence agents are increasingly expected to pull real‑time information from the internet, yet most public search engines are tuned for human interaction, creating latency bottlenecks for machine‑driven queries. Octen, officially APITECH AI Pte Ltd., launched with a $10 million seed round to address this gap. Its purpose‑built search engine offers an API that returns results in a median 62 milliseconds, a speed that outpaces existing solutions by a factor of four. By designing the stack around sub‑100 ms response times, Octen aims to make web‑based reasoning as swift as in‑memory retrieval.

The performance edge stems from Octen’s parallel query fan‑out architecture, which splits complex requests into multiple simultaneous searches and aggregates the findings. Benchmarked on the SealQA Hard suite—over 200 multistep questions—the service achieved a median latency of 62 ms and can handle more than one million queries per second per customer account. This throughput rivals Google’s AI Mode, which recently adopted a similar fan‑out technique, but Octen’s offering is delivered as a developer‑friendly API, allowing third‑party AI platforms to embed high‑speed web access without building their own infrastructure.

For enterprises, the implications are immediate. Financial firms can generate up‑to‑date stock performance reports, while SaaS providers can enrich conversational assistants with live data, all while staying within strict latency budgets. The seed funding will expand Octen’s engineering and developer‑relations teams and scale its globally distributed backend, positioning the startup to capture a niche in the burgeoning AI‑agent ecosystem. As more applications demand real‑time web grounding, a specialized, ultra‑fast search layer could become a critical differentiator, prompting larger cloud players to consider similar offerings or acquisitions.

Deal Summary

Octen, a Singapore‑US AI search startup, announced a $10 million seed round led by Square Peg with participation from Argor and AI researchers. The funding will be used to expand its engineering and developer‑relations teams and scale its high‑speed search API for AI agents.