# Kagi — controversies, management, political ties

*Research summary (compiled 2026-08-03) — the five main points.*

Kagi is a paid, ad-free, privacy-positioned metasearch engine (founded 2018, HQ Palo Alto) run by CEO/founder Vladimir Prelovac (ex-Yugoslavia/Serbian origin; previously ManageWP → GoDaddy VP Product). It aggregates results from Google, Brave Search, Mojeek, Yandex plus its own "Teclis" crawler.

## 1. Management controversy — the "Lori email" affair (April 2024)

- Blogger Lori published "Why I Lost Faith in Kagi" (d-shoot.net/kagi.html). Prelovac emailed her directly (address from her blog) and asked to "bridge the gap" on a call.
- She declined and twice told him to stop contacting her; he kept sending long rebuttal emails. She published the email chain and called it harassment; Mastodon, OSnews ("Do not use Kagi") and the Techlore forum largely sided with her.
- Defenders framed it as an earnest founder engaging with criticism and found the emails not harassing. Either way, it defined his management reputation: combative, boundary-pushing, thin-skinned toward critics.

## 2. Political ties #1 — Yandex (Russia)

- Kagi has used Yandex as a result source since 2019 (~2% of its costs). After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, users demanded it drop Yandex on ethical/geopolitical grounds.
- Prelovac refused, arguing politics must not affect search: "The moment politics influences search results is the moment we stop being a search engine." He also dismissed the kagifeedback.org thread asking for a Yandex integration vote as a "popularity contest."
- Outcome: real cancellations (including a 2-year subscriber on the Mac Power Users forum), heated HN/MPU/feedback threads and boycott calls. Critics described the response as inadequate and in bad faith.

## 3. Political ties #2 — Brave partnership (Brendan Eich)

- Users petitioned Kagi (kagifeedback.org thread "Reconsider your partnership with Brave") to drop Brave because its CEO Brendan Eich is associated with homophobic positions (the Prop 8 donation that forced him out of Mozilla in 2014).
- Prelovac doubled down, allegedly invoking Godwin's law ("Should we not be buying VW, BMW, Siemens and Bayer technology and products today because they participated in the holocaust?"). Kagi reportedly lost ~0.5% of users in a single day.
- Separate criticism: Kagi's Discord moderation was accused of deleting criticism from queer users while leaving homophobic replies up.

## 4. Financial / management red flags

- Spent roughly one third of its $670k seed round on a German T-shirt company to print 20,000 free shirts that didn't even advertise Kagi.
- Claimed it "forgot" to collect/pay US sales tax for two years, then raised prices to cover the back taxes.
- Product sprawl: search, the Orion browser, FastGPT, Universal Summarizer and an email service — all maintained by a very small team.

## 5. Privacy credibility gap

- A "privacy" company that resells third-party search data pipelines, pushes AI tools, processes payments via Stripe, and has a loose definition of PII (Prelovac argued email addresses aren't PII because you can use a burner address).
- Repeated "trust me bro" style responses to security and privacy concerns; GDPR/data-portability questions left unresolved in the public record.