Quixey Raises $3.8M Round; Searching The Functional Web

At last count, there were 425,000 apps in the Apple App Store, and that many choices or more in Google's Android Market. There are BlackBerry apps, Windows Mobile apps, Symbian apps and Palm WebOS apps (not a lot of demand for those right now). And mobile devices aren't the only place you can go to get small, specialized applications for your computing pleasure. There are apps, plug-ins, and various other app analogs for most Web browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome, and for social networks like Facebook and Twitter; Skype last week announced plans for an app store of its own. Add it all together, and you get a new version of the Web, one with focused less on the information you can find, and more on the things you can do.

That's all pretty exciting stuff, until it comes time to find the perfect app for you. Ever do a search in the Apple App Store? Not a good experience. Searching the Web with Google or Bing to find apps isn't especially effective, either.

That's where Quixey comes in.

The 15-employee, Palo Alto-based start up has launched a surprisingly effective, platform-agnostic search engine to help you find apps for every relevant platform. While still a work in progress - the site remains in public beta - Quixey provides highly specific results, directing you to apps that accomplish the task you're trying to solve.

Just two years old, Quixey previously raised $364,0o0 from Innovation Endeavors, Eric Schmidt's personal investment fund, and the incubator Archimedes Ventures. Monday, the company is unveiling a $3.8 million Series A round led by U.S. Venture Partners and the Asian-focused investment fund W.I. Harper, with participation from both Schimdt's fund and the angel investor Maynard Webb, a former COO of eBay.

In an interview in the company's new and so far barely furnished offices, half a block from the Palo Alto branch of the consumer electronics mecca Fry's, co-founder and CEO Tomer Kagan explained that the Quixey does more than just find apps (at least count, he says, they were tracking more than 1.5 million of the little critters.) Quixey also crawls review sites, forums, news sites, social media sites and other corners of the Web, looking for sentences that describe specifically what the apps do - rather relying on the short descriptions the app developers provide themselves. Using "tons of data," he says, Quixey is developing an "ontology of the app."

Kagan says what Quixey is really doing search providing "functional search, for the functional Web." He asserts that there's been a division of the Web into static and dynamic information. Google, he says, is great at static search. But when it comes dynamic search, he contends, they aren't nearly as effective.

While Kagan notes that Quixey will continue to provide a Web version of the service, Quixey's business strategy includes using the same tools to offer specialized search and related services to carriers, app stores and handset makers - at no cost to the company's customers. (Just who the company is partnering with at this point Quixey's not saying, although Kagan says there "a lot of them.") With carriers now metering data usage, he notes, they have incentives to get you to spend more time sucking down bandwidth. And he sees more possibilities than simply search. Kagan says one alternative would be for a carrier or handset maker to pre-populate your phone with a group of apps based on your personal interests. One set of apps for journalists, say; a different set for dentists.

Eventually, Kagan says, the company sees an opportunity to provide ad-supported search results along with the organic results - not unlike what you get now from Google; he says a move to accept ads in still some month away.

Certainly, there are other app search engines out there, including the various app sites themselves, and other third parties, like Chomp, that focuses specifically on Android and iPhone searches. Kagan says Quixey is thinking bigger than his Android-focused rivals: "We're building with a different long term goal," he says. "We wants to be a completely independent platform." So the focus may be Android and iPhone and iPad today, he says, but some other platform tomorrow.

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One side note: While sitting at a folding table with Kagan and some of his colleagues last week at Quixey HQ, just around the corner from another table now mostly emptied of the day's supply of In-N-Out burgers, and within site of the weird circular staircase that appears to be the only way to get to the second floor in a building that was once used as a house, Kagan explained the odd origins of the company's name.

Kagan explains that before starting Quixey, but after leaving a previous startup called Your Logo Here, he worked on a script for a television pilot called "The Valley," about a group of young entrepreneurs. "Think 'Entourage' meets Silicon Valley," he says. Kagan says he pitched the idea to some Hollywood studios, to no avail.

The show, he says, would have focused on the day-to-day travails of a Valley startup. The name of the fake company in the pilot? You guessed it: Quixey. Thinking ahead to the day when the show was a big hit, Kagan says, he had secured the rights to the Quixey.com domain name. Good move: In the early days of the company now actually called Quixey, he says, he and co-founder Liron Shapira started calling their startup "Project Quixey."

And the name stuck.