History
Kagi was founded by Vladimir Prelovac in May 2018 in Palo Alto, CA (USA). Kagi has been completely bootstrapped by the founder for the first 4 years of operation.
We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
Early years
In the first couple of years (2018 - 2019) Kagi was focused on AI technology, driven by the notion that any future search engine will need to have a strong instant question-answering component. We called it "the last mile of search" and this project gave us the domain knowledge and expertise used in Kagi Search today. Other experiments like video question answering were built during this period.
In 2019 the first prototype of Kagi Search is made public. It used an unusual MUD-like, command-line mode with powerful features built in.
First prototype of Orion browser with support for web extensions on iOS is made, giving us 'wings' to continue building the future best browser on Apple devices.
Timeline
2018 (The Age of AI)
- Work begins on Kagi.ai
- Team size: ~3
2019 (First products)
- First prototype of Kagi Search
- Donna.gg is launched as the first attempt to create a premium search business. It failed but we didn't give up
- Work begins on Orion Browser
- Team size: ~5
2020-2021 (COVID years)
- It is all blurred out; we worked a lot. The private beta of Kagi Search and Orion Browser launched
- Team size: ~10
2022 (Public beta and paid customers)
- Kagi Inc. incorporated in March 2022
- Kagi search and Orion browser enter the public beta
- Three months later, thousands of people are paying for Kagi and Orion
- The team is now ~15
2023
- Kagi raises $670K from its users in its first external fundraise. Total money invested nears $5M at this point.
- We publish our live stats
- We cross $1M annual revenue milestone, offering paid web search and paid web browser product