MainFunc Inc. has raised $60 million on the strength of its principal technology — a free, AI-powered search engine called Genspark. The platform responds to queries by writing custom summaries that are presented in a “Sparkpage,” a one-page overview featuring content from around the web. Genspark joins a growing field of generative AI search engines, the best-known of which is Perplexity, which has raised $250 million since its 2022 launch and is currently valued at about $2.5 billion. Reuters says Genspark’s funding values the company at $260 million. Google also offers “AI Overviews” as part of Google search.

TechCrunch writes that the Genspark experience is “similar (conspicuously so) to Arc browser’s Arc Search feature, which launched earlier this year,” as well as the AI Overviews that are gradually rolling out as a feature of Google Search, but notes that its founders claim they’ve differentiated it “by embracing a more surgical approach” that delivers “higher-quality results.”

Instead of relying on a single model, “Genspark uses multiple specialized AI models, each designed to tackle specific types of queries,” MainFunc co-founder Eric Jing told TechCrunch, which writes that “Genspark relies on models trained in-house as well as third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others to categorize users’ search queries and determine how to organize — and present — the results.”

Genspark’s own summary sits atop each results page, followed by a link to a “Sparkpage,” which contains more details. Jing told TechCrunch “Sparkpages are much like a distillation and consolidation of the current web,” but enriched with “comprehensive data” for an end result that looks to users “like an index to the existing web.”

Jing and Kay Zhu — both former executives with Baidu, known as “the Google of China” — launched MainFunc in 2023. The company has offices in Palo Alto and Singapore, where Lanchi Ventures led the seed round.

SiliconANGLE notes that “Genspark also provides access to a built-in chatbot” so users can ask follow-up questions based on their search resuts, “as well as access prompt recommendations that suggest related topics,” along with offering “an interface section dedicated to online shopping,” much like Google Search.

“Users can have Genspark’s embedded chatbot narrow down shopping options based on criteria such as price,” writes SiliconANGLE, adding that “when more information is needed, the AI is capable of generating an entire Sparkpage article about a product” that includes things like customer reviews.

ZDNet — which offers a pre-Genspark roundup of the best AI search engines — points out that the AI-powered platforms supply access to current information, filling the “knowledge gap” that occurs with chatbots, between the time they’re trained and the point of query.