A Chicago tech platform aims to answer users' most pressing questions and has raised $4.2 million to do so.
IAsk — an "answer engine" powered by artificial intelligence — this week announced seed funding led by Corazon Capital, with participation from Chingona Ventures, Starting Line VC, Alumni Ventures, Listen VC, Motivate VC, Octava Singapore and Chicago Early Growth Ventures, among others including prominent angel investors.
Although Google commands 90% of the market in search, iAsk co-founder and CEO Dominik Mazur sees an opportunity with the emergence of artificial intelligence to disrupt the market.
"Google is Google — they dominate search," he told Chicago Inno. "So it's not going to be easy to take on."
Meanwhile, IAsk has processed more than 350 million search queries since launching last year, and the technology is on pace for half a billion by the end of the year, said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Brad Folkens.
"It sounds like a lofty goal, but we're confident that we can take on an important part of [Google's] traffic," he told Chicago Inno.
How iAsk makes money
IAsk makes money through contextual advertising.
"We think that AI should be free and that anybody should be able to use it because it is such a useful utility tool, but we want to support that with advertising," Mazur said.
Mazur and Folkens have 22 years of combined experience in search that Folkens said gives them the perspective to build a more accurate AI platform. The rise of AI has created increased scrutiny for search engines as results have become less reliable for a number of reasons, including increased manipulation of search engine optimization.
"We really focused on making sure to avoid what other AI search engines had trouble with, like hallucinations," he said.
Hallucinations happen when the search engine just doesn't have the knowledge the user seeks, so it will just make up an answer, he explained.
Mazur said when someone searches an inquiry on iAsk, they will get information from the most affirmative and authoritative sources — such as Harvard Medical School or Mayo Clinic for medical-related queries — thus delivering consistently better results than their competitors. IAsk receives up to 1.5 million searches per day, with the majority of interest from Gen Z users — up to 65% of the audience — seeking answers to questions.
The company has found that the platform is especially appealing to students as it presents an opportunity to do research in a way that's faster and more accurate.
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