Startup search engine DuckDuckGo raised its first round of funding led by Union Square Ventures, company founder Gabriel Weinberg announced. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. DuckDuckGo has grown 10 percent month over month for the past year.
Up and coming search engine DuckDuckGo raised a round of funding lead by Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures along with Scott Banister, Jim Young, Jeff Miller, Joshua Schachter, Kal Vepuri, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed at this time.
In a blog post about the deal Burnham writes:
“Our confidence in Gabriel [Weinberg] and DuckDuckGo is informed by having watched the decline of Microsoft’s hegemony in the 90′s. Two things happened that fundamentally changed the game: a shift in venue and a shift in business model. The venue moved from the desktop to the web and the business model shifted from packaged software to open source. It turned out that the way to compete with Microsoft was to not to compete, at least not directly. The way to compete with Microsoft was to change the basis of competition. We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it.”
Right now according to DuckDuckGo traffic stats, they get around 9 million queries per month and are growing 10 percent month over month for the past year. It’s possible they’ll hit around 500,000 searches per day by the beginning of next year.
DuckDuckGo competitor Blekko raised a whopping $15 million in the past month as well. Both of them hope to take away from the 65.3 percent market share that Google now owns.