AI Tool Collection June 19 news, an artificial intelligence search startup founded by former Baidu executives (former Xiaodu Technology CEO Jing Kun and CTO Zhu Kaihua)Gensparkhas raised $60 million in an oversubscribed seed round, joining the ranks of AI search companies such as Perplexity and You.com that are challenging Google's dominance in search engines.
This round was led by Singapore fund Lanchi Ventures, valuing the currently unprofitable startup at $260 million. Lanchi Ventures, formerly BlueRun Ventures China, changed its name last year to distinguish itself from Silicon Valley-origin BlueRun Ventures.
Genspark is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company says its search engine uses various AI model providers to index and summarize information. What sets it apart from other search engines is that it uses multiple specialized AI agents to generate a new customized page for each query, providing useful results on a single page.
Genspark was co-founded by former Xiaodu Technology CEO Jing Kun (Eric Jing) and CTO Zhu Kaihua (Kay Zhu). Jing Kun previously served as vice president of Baidu Group, general manager of Baidu's Smart Living Group (SLG), and chairman of Baidu's Artificial Intelligence Product Committee. He was fully responsible for the product, R&D, operations, and business work of the Xiaodu series hardware, Xiaodu Assistant, and Xiaodu's conversational artificial intelligence operating system (DuerOS). Zhu Kaihua studied at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for both his undergraduate and master's degrees. He worked at Google early in his career and was the creator of a series of core algorithms such as Google Panda. After returning to China in 2013, Zhu Kaihua joined Baidu, and he and Jing Kun began working together as partners in 2014. In September 2020, Xiaodu Technology was officially established, with Jing Kun as CEO and Zhu Kaihua as CTO.
Jing Kun said that Genspark's 20-person team is distributed across Palo Alto, California, and Singapore, and it plans to open a new office in Seattle.
Genspark focuses on serving the US market and offers free use to users, and may explore paid subscriptions in the future. Its AI search engine uses various large language models to handle tasks, from open-source models (such as Meta's Llama) to OpenAI's GPT models.
(Source:Reuters）