AI-powered crypto search engine Kaito raises $5.3 million to improve browsing with AI, ChatGPT

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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.

There are always people struggling with 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.

Round participants include Sequoia Capital, Jane Street, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures, and Alpha Lab Capital, among others. The capital will be used to scale the team and accelerate product development, Hu said. We were talking with 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 in 2021 he noticed that information was so fragmented in crypto. While I had so many amazing tools in traditional finance, there were hardly any in crypto.

The crypto industry doesn’t have a consistent way for people to search for channel information like traditional search engines like Google do for mainstream information. I read the other day that Google was no longer relevant for accessing cryptographic information and that someone was using Twitter to search for information, Hu said. This is obviously a single-silo situation, but highlights the need for a crypto search engine to navigate source information.

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

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

People watch trending topics, which of course can change daily or even hourly in crypto. Every day, there are millions and billions of tweets, and through topic exploration and topic clustering, you can really understand what’s going on in space, Hu said. There are major topics that people search for and a huge overlap in what interests them.

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

Image credits: Kaito (opens in a new window)

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

The startup search engine had been in private alpha mode for its institutional investors since December and is now publicly available. A search engine focused on retail investors will go live in the second quarter of 2023, Hu said. The retail product will be free for everyone, while the institutional product will operate on a subscription model, he said.

The platform separates searches by fact and opinion, Hu showed TechCrunch during a demo. Users can search for keywords like bitcoin and it will show trending topics or general off-chain information around the phrase. Right now, Kaito is focused on off-chain information aggregation and will eventually implement on-chain content, just like Glassnode or Dune Analytics.

Blockchain will become a parallel universe to the web, Hu said. While Bing and ChatGPT serve the web, we serve as a search engine for the Web3.

Eventually, the platform will also roll out a token-based community that leverages a Wikipedia-like model where users can contribute to the platform through a tiered system, Hu said. Users will need to level up and move up the ranks to contribute data knowledge.

Today, it will be a vertical search engine serving crypto users, as they all need one tailored to the community, Hu said.

Going forward, Hu sees blockchain technology becoming something crypto investors don’t just use.

There will be many other average people posting their work on the channel, artists will post NFTs on the channel, it will become a space like a web space in the future and well be parallel to Bing and become a search engine which indexes everything for blockchain, Hu said.

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