Quixey was a company located in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

. Quixey search, which it called "functional", allowed apps to be searched for by the actions the app can perform instead of requiring the user to know the name of the app. In 2015, Quixey raised a $60 million investment round at a valuation of approximately $600 million. Quixey shut down in February 2017.

History

Quixey was co-founded in 2009 by Chief Strategy Officer (and former CEO) Tomer Kagan and Chief Science Officer Liron Shapira. The company spent a year and a half building the product. On December 4, 2012, Quixey partnered with the federated search engine, Ask.com. A month later, the company claimed that it was powering nearly 100 million queries per month. On June 27, 2013, the company announced sponsored results, its first attempt at monetization. In February 2016, several executives reportedly left Quixey as the company missed revenue targets. The company shut down in February 2017.

Funding

At the same time as its private launch, Quixey announced its $400,000 seed round funding, led by

Eric Schmidt Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's chairman, executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the ...

’s Innovation Endeavors. In August 2011, the company closed its

Series A A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

round of funding, led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group, with participation from Webb Investment Network and Innovation Endeavors. Between August 2011 and June 2012, when Quixey announced its Series B round of $20 million, the company grew from six employees to 30.

Partners

Quixey’s partners included

Ask.com Ask.com (known originally as Ask Jeeves) is an answer engine, e-magazine, and former web search engine, operated by Ask Media Group. It was conceptualized and developed in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen (based in Berkeley, Califo ...

, a

federated search Federated search retrieves information from a variety of sources via a search application built on top of one or more search engines. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the search engines, databases or other query engines ...

engine that in 2012 was reported to get 3% of all U.S.-based query volume. The company began powering Ask.com’s app search on December 4, 2012. Quixey powered app search for Sprint on two products: Sprint Digital Lounge and Sprint Zone.

Quixey Challenge

Early on, Quixey built a coding challenge called Quixey Challenge to attract engineering talent. The contest asked participants to solve a bug in under one minute to win $100 and a Quixey t-shirt. In December 2011, the contest yielded 38 winners, five of which became serious candidates for three open positions.

References

{{Reflist, 30em Companies based in Mountain View, California Search engine software Software companies established in 2009 Software companies disestablished in 2017 Software companies based in Mountain View, California 2009 establishments in California 2017 disestablishments in California Defunct software companies of the United States