Israeli AI Startup Keewano Raises $12 Million for New Database
Israeli startup Keewano has announced the launch of KeewanoDB, a novel database designed from the ground up for large-scale machine reasoning. Concurrently, the company revealed it has secured $12 million in seed funding. The round was led by Hetz Ventures and included participation from a16z speedrun, Remagine Ventures, DIG Ventures, and private investors.
KeewanoDB aims to address a critical bottleneck in artificial intelligence development. Unlike traditional databases built for human queries on flat tables, KeewanoDB is engineered to process trillions of events simultaneously, providing AI agents with contextually accurate, real-time answers. This new architecture eliminates the per-event pricing model common in the industry.
The company was founded in 2024 by CEO Mark Kerdashoff, Dima Kriger, Pavel Bibergal, and Vitaly Bukhovtsky. The founding team brings extensive industry experience, including Kerdashoff and Bukhovtsky's previous exits from TestProject (sold to Tricentis in 2019) and Devalore (sold to Abira in 2022). Bibergal previously served as CTO at gaming company Plarium, where Kriger managed a leading studio.
"When you aim to use AI agents to answer complex business questions, you discover that existing databases were designed for humans, not for machines that need to draw conclusions in real-time," stated Kerdashoff. He likened the situation to Japan building a new railway line in 1964 instead of trying to speed up trains on the old one, emphasizing that AI agents require a fundamentally different data architecture.
Yehuda Taub, Managing Partner at Hetz Ventures, added that each wave of AI adoption exposes underlying layers not built for new workloads, and Keewano is addressing this gap at its core.
