We’re excited to share that Linkup has raised a $10M seed round led by Gradient, with support from leading investors and founders from Mistral, Datadog, Deel and Dataiku.
This funding will enable us to further develop our search infrastructure, grow our team of engineers and researchers, and build what we see as the essential rails for the emerging web of AI agents.
We’re also announcing today the launch of Linkup /fast, the world’s most accurate sub-second web search API.
AI’s Airplane Mode Problem
AI systems today are remarkably capable, but they have a fundamental limitation: their knowledge is frozen at the moment their training ends. Ask an AI about yesterday’s news, current product pricing, or a company’s latest earnings, and you’ll quickly hit a wall.
Think about using your phone with airplane mode permanently enabled. You’d have access to everything already downloaded, but nothing new, nothing current. That’s essentially how AI systems operate without access to real-time web information. They’re incredibly smart, but operating with outdated maps of a rapidly changing world.
AI has the potential to unlock transformative outcomes: accelerating research breakthroughs, driving productivity gains, and fueling business growth. But realizing this potential hinges entirely on one thing: access to accurate, timely data.
This limitation becomes critical as AI systems take on mission-critical workflows across finance, healthcare, enterprise operations, and beyond. In these contexts, mistakes can be extremely costly, lead to misleading conclusions, and create serious reputational damage.
Why Traditional Search Fails AI
The obvious solution might seem simple: just connect AI to existing search engines. But search engines built for humans and those built for AI need to work in fundamentally different ways.
Traditional search was built to return links. AI systems need context, raw information, and current data.
Search engines were designed for human behavior: you enter a query, get a list of relevant pages, click through, skim headings, and decide what’s useful. AI systems don’t need that. They need the information itself: extracted, structured, and ready to process. A link is useless to an AI; it needs the text, the data, the context behind that link.
But it’s not just about format. Traditional search indexes what humans want to see: popular websites, engaging content, pages optimized to keep people clicking. AI systems need something different: trusted sources, verified facts, and accurate information, not content engineered for engagement metrics. And they can go beyond web pages and leverage data on web servers, accessing the structured information that sits behind interfaces – databases, APIs, real-time feeds – rather than being limited to what’s rendered on a page.