Quixey

» see quixey.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Somewhere around $130 million was spent on the idea that applications needed a search engine of their own. That sounds ridiculous stated flatly in 2026 and it was not ridiculous in 2012, when the average phone had forty apps on it, the web had been the searchable thing for fifteen years, and everything moving to phones was moving out of reach of a crawler at the same time.

Tomer Kagan and Liron Shapira started Quixey in Mountain View in 2009 with what they called functional search. You would not type the name of an app, because if you knew the name you did not need them. You would type what you wanted done, and it would find the app that did it, and later it would find the specific screen inside the app that did it. Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors led a $400,000 seed. A $3.8 million round followed in August 2011, then $20 million in June 2012, then Alibaba, then $60 million at a $600 million valuation in 2015.

I have no personal history with this one at all, and neither does anyone I know, because Quixey mostly lived inside other companies' products rather than as an app you would install. The reason to write it down is structural and it is the same reason it died. A search engine needs an index, an index needs a crawlable corpus, and the corpus here was two stores owned by the two companies that also make the phones. You cannot build a neutral layer on top of a shelf when the shelf owner can move the shelf.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

Alibaba's involvement is what makes this a different kind of death from the ordinary startup one. The investment came with an ordinary shareholder relationship and then, in August 2016, with a rescue package: $10 million paid in plus about $30 million of debt financing, on an eighteen month repayment clock, with a veto over any future equity round attached to it.

That veto is the whole ending. In February 2017 the existing investors, Atlantic Bridge Capital among them, agreed to put in another $10 million to keep the company alive. Alibaba blocked it. A company that has a shareholder who is also its lender has one party at the table whose interests point at the assets rather than at the future, and when that party can veto the future, there is only one direction left. The staff were laid off and an outside firm was hired to sell the intellectual property. Alibaba's public line afterward was that development had not met expectations and the board decided to end the business.

~ the long tail ~

The technical idea did not die with the company, it just got absorbed by the platforms it was competing with. Google shipped App Indexing and Firebase Dynamic Links, Apple built app search into Spotlight, and for a while it looked like deep linking into apps would become as normal as linking into web pages.

It did not. Google shut Firebase Dynamic Links down on 25 August 2025, and every link that service had ever handed out now returns a 404, which is a larger number of broken links than Quixey ever created. The open, searchable, addressable layer inside apps was tried by a startup with $130 million, tried again by the largest search company in the world, and abandoned by both. What we have instead is a shelf of icons, arranged by whoever owns the phone, and a search box that finds the app by its name if you already know it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »