Market Map and Analysis: Gen AI Search Companies
In the Search space, Consumers are getting customizable, fact-based search tools, and Enterprises convenient and reliable knowledge base search platforms
Among generative AI use cases, Search is a compelling one for consumers and businesses alike. A more than US$200B market, it hasn’t seen significant changes or disruptions in user experience or industry dynamics for over a decade. Which is why the emergence of new companies trying to optimize and transform the way that search works and capture significant shares of the market is important and exciting.
The Consumer Seach Space Is Developing around Personalization and Accuracy
You.com and Perplexity.ai are both companies based in the San Francisco Bay
Area working on search for consumers.
You.com, with a mission to build the world’s only democratized search platform, emphasizes giving control to the user through customization of the appearance, information sources and plug-ins that it uses to retrieve information. The company is also developing a new way of getting search results, with a multi-dimensional interface with horizontal and vertical scrolling. You.com raised its Series A $US25M round in June of 2023 and is available through the web, and iOS and Android apps.
Perplexity. ai’s stated mission is to build the world’s most trusted information service with the help of augmented retrieval generation, which provides consumers with citations to help them get accurate results. Users have the ability to personalize their experience based on their bio, language and location. A partnerships with Wolfram provides Perplexity with computational tools and knowledge. Another point of differentiation is the emphasis on curated suggestions for deeper dives on search queries. Positioned as “The Future of Search”, the company raised a US$26M Series A in April of 2023.
The Enterprise Space is Focused on Making Business Search Convenient and Reliable
Multi-purpose solutions, such as Vectara, Nuclia and Dashworks collect, analyze, classify information and answer questions from enterprise knowledge bases. Products focus on business app integration and compatibility with a variety of information sources, such as documents, messages, emails.
Specialized solutions, such as Hebbia, Seek and Metaphor are targeted at business analytics and enterprise data platforms. They help simplify data discovery from complex data sets, insight generation and cross-functional collaboration around data.
Vectara is a developer-first API platform for conversational search experiences. It supports Zero Shot ML, which continuously learns new data, without the need to fine-tune and re-train, and retrieval augmented generation that minimizes hallucinations. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vectara raised a US$28.5M Seed round in June of 2023.
Dashworks’ mission is to make humanity omniscient and its product is “Your company’s all-in-one search assistant”. It supports integrations with over 40 business applications and it is optimized to be secure, adaptable and affordable. Also based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dashworks raised a US$4M Seed round in January of 2023.
Nuclia is an out-of-the-box generative AI product creation tool which supports text, audio and video input. It optimizes for speed and ease of implementation and the wide variety of types of information sources and integrations it supports. Based in Barcelona, Spain, it raised a $5.9M Seed round in April of 2022.
Metaphor is a search and insights discovery platform for data professionals. Targeted at Data Engineers, Analytics Engineers, Subject Matter Experts, it enables its users to build and maintain a self-service platform to document data insights, support customers and discover relevant information across the stack.
For Business Analysts, Product teams and Data Scientists, it enables them to find data, read documentation, insights and metrics, share and collaborate across functions.
Hebbia is an Enterprise tool for high information search, retrieval and generation. It integrates with major productivity applications and it is optimized for financial and business data to be used for use cases such as financial due diligence and business market research. Based in New York, NY, it raised a US$30M Series A in November of 2022.
Seek is a business analytics query and analysis conversational tool which aims to make business intelligence more accessible and convenient to use. It integrates with data managemenet and business collaboration applications and its goal is to empower teams to be more data-driven without overwhelming the data team. Based in New York, NY, it raised a US$7.5M Seed round in January of 2023.
Kagi is a summarization tool built by the team behind the search engine with the same name.
Atolio uses collaborative graphs to integrate across teams and business applications and documents to provide a unified search experience.
As with all generative AI companies, their products, value propositions and business models are just beginning to take shape. They are challengers to Google and are also competing with established search engines, such as Microsoft’s and Baidu’s. Core features and services are still being developed and refined and product differentiation is likely to become more clear as each of these companies builds and solidifies their offering. Whether in the Consumer or Enterprise space, search might become even more powerful and convenient, customizable and relevant, and this is a win for everybody involved.
