AI-Powered Crypto Search Engine Kaito Raises $5.3M To Improve Web Browsing With AI, ChatGPT • TechCrunch

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Kaito, an AI-powered crypto search engine, raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by Dragonfly Capital, the company exclusively shared with TechCrunch.

“People are constantly fighting against information overload,” said Yu Hu, founder and CEO of Kaito. “We shorten the path to finding answers from 30 minutes or an hour to 10 seconds.”

Participants in the round include, among others, Sequoia Capital, Jane Street, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures and Alpha Lab Capital. The capital will be used to scale the team and accelerate the development of the product, Hu shared. “We are talking to OpenAI, Binance and Dragonfly for our next round,” he said.

Hu is a former Citadel executive who spent nearly a decade working in traditional finance. He started researching crypto and investing in 2017, but by 2021 he noticed that information was “so fragmented in crypto.” “While I had so many amazing tools in traditional finance, there were virtually none in crypto.”

The crypto industry doesn’t have a cohesive way for people to search for information across channels the way traditional search engines like Google do for regular information. “I read the other day that Google was no longer relevant for accessing crypto information, and that a person was using Twitter to search for information,” Hu said. “It’s obviously a one-silo situation, but highlights the need for a search engine in crypto to navigate information by source.”

“Anything that lives on the blockchain, a generic search engine doesn’t look at today.”

In general, it is difficult to find information about the ecosystem, given how much is hidden away on platforms that are not collected on a general search engine such as Google. For example, if there is a Twitter space or a conversation on the platform, when you Google keywords around it, it is very unlikely that the exact information will come up. But through Kaito, this information will be collected in a way that makes it accessible, which can be extremely valuable.

People look at trending themes, which of course can change daily – if not hourly – in crypto. “Every day there are millions and billions of tweets, and through topic mining and topic clustering, you can actually figure out what’s trending in the space,” Hu said. “There are big topics people are searching for and a big overlap in what people are interested in.”

Kaito’s MetaSearch aims to solve this problem through a one-click product that enables users to search across the entire social crypto landscape through platforms such as Twitter, Discord, governance forums, Mirror, Medium, podcast transcripts and research, for to name a few.

Image credit: Kaito (opens in new window)

Apart from gathering information, Kaito leverages AI to optimize its search engine through ranking, topic mining, personalization, recommendation, speech-to-text transcription and AI-generated content. It also integrates ChatGPT/GPT-3 to provide an additional search experience for crypto users.

The startup’s search engine was in private alpha mode for its institutional investors since December and is now available to the public. A retail investor-focused search engine will be active in the second quarter of 2023, Hu said. The retail product will be free for all, while the institutional will run a subscription-based model, he said.

The platform separates searches for “facts and opinions,” Hu showed TechCrunch during a demo. Users can search keywords like “Bitcoin” and it will show trending topics or general off-chain information around the phrase. Right now, Kaito is focused on gathering information outside the chain and will eventually implement content in the chain, just like Glassnode or Dune Analytics.

“The blockchain will become a parallel universe versus the web,” Hu said. “While Bing and ChatGPT serve the web, we act as a search engine for web3.”

Eventually, the platform will also roll out a token-based community that will leverage a similar model to Wikipedia where users can contribute to the platform through a tiered system, Hu said. “Users have to level up and work their way up the ranks to contribute to computer literacy.”

“Today will be a vertical search engine that serves the crypto users because they all need one that is tailored to the community,” Hu said.

In the future, Hu sees blockchain technology becoming something that not only crypto investors use.

“There will be many other average people posting their work on chain, artists will publish NFTs on chain, it will become a space like a web hotel in the future, and we will be parallel to Bing and become a search engine that indexes everything for blockchain,” Hu said.