With the explosion of apps, the app discovery game has also turned into a competitive market, with a number of services looking to be the place where users find quality apps. And these start-ups are pulling in big funding to make sure they’re the go-to resource in this expanding market.
Quixey, an app search engine with $ 400,000 in initial seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, has just announced $ 3.8 million in new funding. The Series A funding comes from US Venture Partners, WI Harper Group, Web Investment Network along with additional funding from Innovation Endeavors.
The money will go toward the expansion of Quixey, which tries to partner with websites, app stores, search engines and carriers to offer its services. Quixey is trying to stand out by offering what it calls a functional search engine, which takes in more than just a title and description of an app but pulls in information from blogs, forums, review sites and social networks to better understand what an app actually does. Then it allows users to enter queries on what they want to do with an app, without having to know the name of a particular app. It pulls up results for apps on various platforms including Android, iPad and iPhone as well as recommendations for Windows, Mac, Explorer, Firefox and the web.
Competitor Appsfire pulled in $ 3.6 million in May while Chomp, an app recommendation service also raised $ 2 million in March. This is just another sign that apps are booming, (mobile apps alone are expected to bring in $ 37 billion by 2015), and it’s creating a lot of opportunities, not just for developers but for services that play on this explosion of apps.
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