CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--iAsk, the AI “Answer Engine” built for Gen Z, today announced it has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Corazon Capital, with participation from Chingona Ventures, Starting Line VC, Alumni Ventures, Listen VC, Motivate VC, Octava Singapore, Chicago Early Growth Ventures, and multiple prominent angel investors. In addition to the round, iAsk also announced that it has successfully processed over 350 million search queries since launching last year. Finally, iAsk soft-launched its API for businesses and developers, which already has a waitlist of over 7,000 unique potential customers.
Over time, search engine results have become less reliable for a number of reasons. Increased search engine optimization (SEO) manipulation means that many search engines prioritize ranking tactics over content quality, flooding top results with less informative pages. Paid placements and advertisements continually push organic results further down, and frequent algorithm changes and personalization can sometimes lead to repetitive or skewed results.
iAsk receives up to 1.5 million searches per day, with strong interest from Gen Z users seeking convenient, accurate answers to their questions. Since the company’s launch, it has successfully processed 350 million searches on the platform and is on pace to exceed half a billion searches by the end of 2024.
"The increasing popularity of AI chatbots has led to more consumers using these chatbots for search, even though chatbots are not trained to quickly and accurately search the web and are often years outdated," said Dominik Mazur, iAsk Co-founder and CEO. "It only takes a couple of incorrect answers for a user to lose trust, which is why we have focused our efforts on accuracy so that users can harness AI for faster, more accurate answers to their questions from authoritative sources, without all the back-and-forth interactions that chatbots require."
iAsk enables users to ask questions in natural language and receive detailed and accurate responses instantly. Engaging state-of-the-art AI known as transformer neural networks, it reports top scores for accuracy on various gold-standard academic benchmarks, delivering consistently better results than ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Claude.ai, and all other AI models. iAsk was named Best Search Engine of 2024 by Slashdot.
"The recent DOJ ruling means that companies can once again start innovating in the search realm and build better experiences with consumers—not advertisers—at the center. We expect this to lead to a vibrant ecosystem in search, with users ultimately benefiting and receiving increased value from search," added iAsk Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder Brad Folkens.
For more information about iAsk or to try the product today, please visit the website at iAsk.Ai.
About iAsk
iAsk is an advanced, free AI search engine that enables users to ask questions in natural language and receive instant, accurate answers. For more information, visit https://iask.ai/.
