Kagi Inc.
Headquarters
Palo Alto, CAFounded
2018CEO / Founder
Vladimir PrelovacEmployees
11-50Funding
BootstrappedProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.8/10Website
kagi.com/
Profile updated
About Kagi Inc.
Kagi Inc. is a search engine and browser company founded in 2018 by Vladimir Prelovac and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company operates on a subscription-based model, charging users directly for access to its search engine rather than relying on advertising revenue. This positions it as an alternative to ad-supported search engines such as Google and Bing.
Kagi's primary product is its eponymous search engine, which offers features including customizable search result rankings, the ability to block or boost specific domains, and a summarization tool called Universal Summarizer. The company also develops Orion, a WebKit-based web browser for macOS and iOS that blocks ads and trackers by default and supports extensions from both Chrome and Firefox. Kagi search plans are offered on a tiered subscription basis, with pricing ranging from a limited free tier to unlimited paid plans.
Kagi has operated as a bootstrapped company and has not disclosed external venture funding. The team is small, with the company employing fewer than 50 people as of available public information. Prelovac previously founded ManageWP, a WordPress management platform that was acquired by GoDaddy in 2016.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Kagi Inc.
All products by Kagi Inc. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Kagi Inc.
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Kagi Inc.'s product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.0 points — The Skeptic was the hardest to convince, The Domain Practitioner the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Kagi Inc. competes with, and how they differ.
Google Search is free and ad-supported, monetizing queries and user data at massive scale; Kagi charges a subscription specifically to remove that incentive, trading Google's zero price for an ad-free, non-tracking result set.
6 products reviewed on TopReviewedDuckDuckGo is free, funded by non-personalized contextual ads, and leans heavily on Bing's index; Kagi is subscription-only past a 100-search trial and blends its own Teclis crawl with other sources rather than showing any ads.
Brave Search runs its own independent index but is primarily free and ad-supported, with an optional paid ad-free tier; Kagi is subscription-first from the outset and takes no advertising revenue at all.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Perplexity is an AI answer engine that synthesizes chat-style responses from live web results, monetized via a freemium Pro subscription and enterprise API; Kagi returns a traditional ranked-link results page with an optional AI Assistant add-on, priced from the first searches after its free trial.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewed
You.com pairs web search with a choice of multiple AI chat models under a freemium, credit-based plan; Kagi's core product stays link-based search with a flat monthly subscription and no free ad-supported tier.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Kagi Inc.'s history, with sources.
- Milestone
Reaches 50,000 members
Kagi announced its community had grown to 50,000 members (including 5,000+ families and ~200 teams), approaching 1 million daily search queries, three years after its June 2022 public launch.
blog.kagi.com - Launch
Launches "The Assistant by Kagi" AI feature
Introduced an AI assistant giving access to multiple third-party LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral) inside Kagi, initially limited to the Ultimate plan.
blog.kagi.com - Milestone
Announces profitability and second investor round
Kagi reported reaching profitability and said 93 community members had joined as investors across two rounds (2023 and 2024, ~$2.5M combined), while projecting 1 million paying users within 36 months at then-current organic growth.
blog.kagi.com - Milestone
Converts to a Public Benefit Corporation
Kagi Inc. converted to a Public Benefit Corporation in early 2024, formalizing a user-aligned mission alongside its subscription business model.
help.kagi.com - Funding
Raises $670K in first external fundraise
Closed a $670K SAFE note round with 42 accredited investors, most of them existing paying users — the company's first external capital after being self-funded by the founder since 2018.
blog.kagi.com - Milestone
Restructures pricing into tiered plans
Replaced the flat $10/month unlimited plan with Standard ($5/mo, 200 searches), Professional ($10/mo, 700 searches) and Ultimate ($25/mo, unlimited) tiers effective March 15-16, 2023, citing rising per-search infrastructure costs.
blog.kagi.com - Milestone
Crosses $1M annual revenue
Kagi states it crossed the $1M annual revenue milestone in 2023 across its paid search and paid browser products.
help.kagi.com - Launch
Kagi Search and Orion Browser launch publicly
Kagi Search (paid, ad-free search) and Orion Browser (WebKit-based, zero-telemetry) both launched publicly on June 1, 2022, after a private beta period.
blog.kagi.com - Milestone
Kagi Inc. incorporated
The company formally incorporated as Kagi Inc. in March 2022, shortly before Kagi Search and Orion Browser entered public beta.
help.kagi.com - Founded
Vladimir Prelovac founds Kagi in Palo Alto, CA
Prelovac, who previously sold WordPress management tool ManageWP to GoDaddy, began building a paid, ad-free search engine after concluding free, ad-supported search misaligns incentives with users.
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