Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back… Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it. From their website: Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023

Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back… Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it. From their website: Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93. Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats. In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).