Xonaly founder Jonathan Bouchard is building a Canadian search engine from scratch
The Quebec project says it has indexed more than 1.3 million pages without Google, Bing, tracking, ads, or outside funding.
By Ryan Merket ยท Published
Why it matters
Xonaly is small, but its bet is pointed: privacy search is more defensible when the founder owns the crawler, index, and infrastructure instead of reskinning an incumbent.
Jonathan Bouchard is pitching Xonaly as a Canadian search engine with its own crawler, its own index, and a very deliberate refusal to become another privacy wrapper around Google or Bing.
The live product is modest by search standards: Xonaly's homepage says it has indexed more than 1.3 million pages as of June 28, 2026, and offers a bilingual English-French interface, browser setup instructions, and a built-in weather module. But the founder's bet is larger than the counter on the homepage. Xonaly is trying to make technological independence the product itself.
Bouchard, whom Xonaly identifies as founder and developer of Xonaly Inc., frames the project as a response to the modern search stack: user profiling, targeted advertising, and infrastructure controlled by a small number of large companies. Xonaly's founder page says he came to the project after years in web development, digital systems, and technical optimization. It does not list a university, prior employer, exit, or venture backer. That matters because the operating story here is not a decorated founder trading credentials for capital. It is a builder taking on one of the web's hardest infrastructure problems with a small, independent team.
The real claim: not a proxy
Search startups often compete on privacy while quietly relying on someone else's index. Xonaly is trying to draw a harder line. On its How Xonaly Works page, Xonaly says it is not a proxy, not a meta-search engine, and not dependent on third-party APIs. The company says its robots crawl thousands of pages every day and build an index that is "entirely our own."
That distinction is the center of the story. DuckDuckGo, one of the best-known private search brands, says its search pages combine many sources, maintain its own crawler and indexes, and largely source traditional links and images from Bing. Brave Search, by contrast, markets itself around an independent, built-from-scratch index. Mojeek, a UK-based search company, says it has developed its technology from scratch, owns its IP, and passed 9 billion pages in 2025.
Xonaly is closer in positioning to Brave Search and Mojeek than to a Bing-powered privacy interface. It is nowhere near their apparent scale. A claimed 1.3 million-page index is small in a market where relevance, freshness, crawl coverage, spam filtering, ranking quality, and latency compound against newcomers. But the technical posture is clear: Xonaly wants users to judge it as an independent search engine, not as a front end for an incumbent.
What Bouchard says he built
Xonaly describes a search pipeline with autonomous crawling, filtering, and local semantic analysis. According to Xonaly, each page is screened for language, minimum length, readability, HTML structure, and empty-page removal. The company says each page is then analyzed locally, without external AI or cloud processing, to extract topic, tone, content type, estimated reading time, and a relevance score.
The pitch is deliberately unfashionable. At a moment when many search products are being reframed around AI answers, Xonaly is emphasizing crawlers, local processing, sovereign infrastructure, and a clean search box. The homepage's weather module and language toggle make it feel more like a local utility than a venture-funded AI search app. That is not accidental. Xonaly's materials repeatedly use the language of privacy, neutrality, no tracking, no ads, and Canadian hosting.
The company also makes the product configurable enough for daily use. Its browser setup page gives instructions for Chrome, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Firefox, Safari, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows taskbar shortcuts. The practical test for any search product is whether it can become the address-bar habit, not just a site someone visits once.
The business model sits in the API
Xonaly says it does not run ads and does not track users (see its privacy policy). That creates the obvious question: who pays for crawling, indexing, servers, and ranking work?
The company's answer is infrastructure access. Its API documentation lists private API access for developers and organizations at $1 per 1,000 requests, with volume plans and institutional access available on request. The docs say the API queries Xonaly's independent search index collected by custom Xonaly robots and returns fields such as URL, domain, title, description, language, HTTP code, and score.
That puts Xonaly in a narrow but real market. Search APIs have value for developers building internal tools, research products, compliance workflows, vertical search, and AI retrieval systems that do not want to depend entirely on the incumbent search providers. But API revenue depends on trust in the index. A self-reported page count is not enough. Buyers will care about freshness, coverage, ranking quality, uptime, rate limits, and whether the corpus has enough useful pages for their domain.
Xonaly has not disclosed query volume, API customers, revenue, retention, uptime, or headcount. It also has not published an outside audit of its index size or search quality. Those omissions do not undercut the existence of the product, but they do define the next bar. In search, independence is a starting condition. Usefulness is the moat.
A small Canadian company in an infrastructure category
Xonaly's legal and public footprint looks young. Xonaly's privacy policy lists an effective date of May 26, 2025. A B2BHint company profile, citing Canada federal company data, lists Xonaly Inc. as incorporated on November 25, 2025, with company number 17500122 and a legal address in Sainte-Sophie, Quebec. Because that profile is a third-party mirror rather than the live Corporations Canada record, the incorporation details should be read as attributed public-record data, not as a company announcement.
The financing picture is equally sparse. Xonaly's own French-language private search page says there is no external financing ("Aucun financement externe"). No venture round, accelerator, grant, valuation, or named angel investor is publicly established from the available materials. The safest read is that Xonaly appears bootstrapped, at least by the company's own description.
That makes the company unusually exposed to the economics of its own thesis. Running an independent search engine is not a landing-page problem. Crawling creates bandwidth and compute costs. Indexing requires storage and ranking infrastructure. Spam filtering is constant. Legal and content-risk questions grow with scale. Every additional page increases both the value of the corpus and the operational surface area.
Still, Xonaly is choosing the part of search that many privacy products avoid: owning the index. That is why the small page count is not merely a limitation. It is also the evidence of what Bouchard is trying to build. If Xonaly grows, the story will not be that Canada has another private search box. It will be that a Quebec founder proved there was still room, however narrow, for an independent web index built outside the default Google-Bing gravity well.