This may or may not be a concern for some users, but it’s something that I hadn’t expected and wanted to make folks aware of.

Kagi’s mailing address is in San Francisco, but at least some, if not the bulk, of their facilities and employees are in Serbia:

https://teslanation.org/kagi-ai-is-a-new-startup-that-wants-to-completely-reverse-the-way-we-search/

At the moment, a team led by Prelovac currently has six members, half of whom work in Serbia.

They’re currently only hiring remote employees, plus an office manager for an office in Serbia:

https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers

Hub & Facilities Coordinator

Human Resoures, Full Time Position, Serbia

I assume that the HR/office manager in Serbia means that there are other employees being hired in Serbia and facilities in Serbia.

From Google searching Kagi’s address:

AI Overview
The address
548 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94104 is used by the search engine company Kagi as a mailing address.
More specifically, Kagi Inc. uses the following mailing address:

Kagi Inc.
548 Market St PMB 477946
San Francisco, CA 94104-5401

The building at 548 Market Street functions as a location that is shared by many different businesses as a virtual office or a mailing address, often using a Private Mailbox (PMB) number. Other entities that use this address include Change.org, Earth Class Mail, and Trans Lifeline.

That is, this gives you a San Francisco mailing address, but it doesn’t mean that you have your physical location there.

The founder, Vladimir Prelovac, is from Serbia; there are many references to him being in Belgrade (e.g. “Lives in Belgrade, Serbia” on his Quora profile), so that fits with it. I don’t care that he’s from Serbia, but I do care about the likelihood that the company operates from Serbia.

How much this matters to you may depend on who you are. Kagi is mostly interesting to me from a privacy standpoint; I’m interested in, for example, if they advertise that they don’t log data — which they do advertise — and wind up doing so, having a legal regimen that they’d be subject to that would mean that they’d be subject to lawsuits; I’d be more-comfortable with a company and employees based in the US (or at least somewhere like the EU).

It’s possible that someone else might not want a US-based company, but at least for me, that revelation is certainly something that makes me look at the company in a new light from a privacy standpoint. Note that Kagi also provides a browser (which one does not need to use), extensions for other browsers (which one does not need to use), has access to search data which is probably linked to financial information, and while they do have a Privacy Pass extension, are the source of that Privacy Pass extension. If you did believe that they intended to retain data, they’d be in a strong position to do so.

It is possible to use Kagi via a VPN or Tor and pay for them using cryptocurrency (one could argue how anonymizing the latter is, but it’s certainly simply not providing one’s name and address). But if one is not going to those fairly-extensive extremes, then the company does have access to some information, and a lot of the degree to which one values the service needs to come down to how much one trusts the company.

Just wanted to make others aware.