AI search engine startup Genspark reportedly raises $100M at $530M valuation

Genspark, a man-made intelligence search startup that competes with Google LLC, has reportedly raised $100 million in funding.

Reuters immediately cited sources as saying that the spherical was led by a gaggle of U.S. and Singapore-based traders. The deal reportedly values Genspark at $530 million, greater than twice what it was value in June.

Genspark, formally Mainfunc Inc., launched final yr with $60 million in preliminary funding. Its namesake search engine topped 1 million month-to-month customers in November. Sources advised Reuters that Genspark now has 2 million customers, which was possible one of many components behind the steep enhance within the firm’s valuation. 

Genspark’s search engine makes use of massive language fashions to course of queries. When a person sorts in a query, the service doesn’t return a listing of related webpages however somewhat shows a pure language reply. Genspark organizes every of its immediate responses right into a webpage referred to as Sparkpages that permits customers to ask followup questions.

The corporate additionally provides plenty of specialised search options. One functionality is geared in the direction of searching e-commerce web sites’ product listings. One other instrument, Genspark Finance, visualizes information from earnings experiences in graphs to ease evaluation. 

One of many newest additions to the search engine’s function set is a functionality referred to as Deep Analysis. It offers extra detailed solutions to person queries at the price of elevated wait occasions: Genspark says {that a} immediate response can take as much as half-hour to generate. In keeping with the corporate, the function spends that point analyzing greater than 1 million phrases’ value of knowledge from greater than a thousand sources.

Beneath the hood, Genspark’s search engine is powered by what it describes as a mixture-of-agent structure. The software program sends every person question to LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Google. Genspark removes inconsistencies between the fashions’ responses after which combines them right into a single reply.

In the present day’s report didn’t specify how the corporate plans to spend its newly raised funding. One chance is that Genspark might add reasoning-optimized LLMs to the lineup of fashions it makes use of to course of prompts.

In keeping with a Feb. 10 weblog publish, the corporate’s search engine depends on GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 2.0 Flash to reply queries. These are midrange LLMs that stability output high quality with {hardware} effectivity. Including a extra hardware-intensive, reasoning-optimized mannequin akin to OpenAI’s o1 to the checklist might probably assist Genspark improve its search engine’s output. 

The corporate’s funding spherical comes just a few weeks after Perplexity AI Inc., a competing AI search startup, closed a $500 million funding of its personal. The deal reportedly valued the corporate at $9 million. Final week, Perplexity launched a function much like Genspark’s Deep Analysis that may generate multipage immediate responses in response to person queries. 

Picture: Genspark