By Anna Tong
(Reuters) – Search startup Genspark has raised $100 million in a series A funding round, valuing the startup at $530 million, according to a source familiar with the matter, as the race to use artificial intelligence to disrupt Google’s stranglehold on the search engine market heats up.
The Palo Alto-based company currently has over 2 million monthly active users, and the round was led by a group of U.S. and Singapore-based investors, the source said.
The company raised a $60 million seed round last June. Its CEO Eric Jing led Baidu’s AI-powered smartphone and smart speaker Xiaodu unit.
Genspark is one of a number of startups attempting to uproot the search engine market dominated by Alphabet’s Google. AI-generated search results can offer a single answer with citations, a potential user experience improvement compared to Google’s link lists.
Google itself is experimenting with AI search results, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently integrated internet search capabilities. Another big player in the AI search space, Perplexity, has raised funds valuing it at $9 billion.
According to its blog, Genspark says it has developed a feature capable of using multiple AI models that work together to conduct in-depth research online. OpenAI, Perplexity and You.com have also released similar products.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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