Kaito aims to address the lack of a cohesive way to search for information in the crypto industry
Kaito, an AI-powered search engine for the crypto industry, has raised $5.3 million in a seed funding round led by Dragonfly Capital. The funding round also saw participation from Sequoia Capital, Jane Street, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures, and Alpha Lab Capital, among others. The capital raised in this round will be used to scale the team and accelerate the development of the product.
According to Yu Hu, the CEO and founder of Kaito, their platform is designed to tackle the issue of information overload within the cryptocurrency industry. Hu stated that Kaito’s goal is to reduce the time it takes to obtain answers from 30 minutes or an hour to just 10 seconds.
Yu Hu, a former manager at Citadel with almost ten years of experience in traditional finance, began exploring the world of cryptocurrency and investing in 2017. However, in 2021, he observed that the information available in the crypto industry was highly fragmented. Hu noted that unlike traditional finance, where he had access to numerous exceptional tools, the cryptocurrency industry had virtually none.
The Crypto Industry Needs a Cohesive Search Engine
According to Hu, the cryptocurrency industry lacks a unified approach for individuals to conduct comprehensive searches across various channels, similar to how mainstream search engines such as Google operate. He stated that presently, standard search engines do not examine any content that exists on the blockchain.
Due to the extensive amount of information that is spread across various platforms and not consolidated on popular search engines like Google, it can be challenging to locate information regarding the cryptocurrency ecosystem. However, Kaito intends to tackle this problem with its MetaSearch feature, which empowers users to conduct searches across the complete social cryptocurrency landscape via platforms such as governance forums, Twitter, Discord, Medium, podcast transcripts, and research.
Kaito Leverages AI to Optimize Its Search Engine
In addition to consolidating information, Kaito employs AI to enhance its search engine via activities like ranking, topic mining, personalization, recommendation, speech-to-text transcription, and AI-generated content. Furthermore, the platform is integrating ChatGPT/GPT-3 to provide an additional search experience specifically for cryptocurrency users.
Kaito categorizes its searches into “facts and opinions,” enabling users to search for keywords such as “Bitcoin,” which displays popular topics or general off-chain information associated with the term. Currently, the platform is primarily focused on consolidating off-chain data and plans to integrate on-chain content in the future, similar to platforms like Glassnode or Dune Analytics.
Kaito’s Community Token-Based Model
In the future, Kaito plans to 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 stated that users would have to advance in rank and work their way up to contribute to the knowledge database.
The platform is 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 live in the second quarter of 2023, with the retail product being free to everyone, while the institutional one will run a subscription-based model, Hu said.
Kaito is looking to partner with OpenAI, Binance, and Dragonfly for its next round of funding. In the future, Hu sees blockchain technology becoming something that not just crypto investors use. In the future, according to Hu, many individuals, including average people and artists, will upload their content on-chain, and this will transform the blockchain space into an environment similar to the web. In this scenario, Kaito aims to become a search engine that indexes all blockchain-related content and will run parallel to platforms like Bing.
Conclusion
Kaito’s MetaSearch aims to revolutionize the way people search for cryptocurrency-related information. By aggregating off-chain and eventually on-chain data, leveraging AI to optimize its search engine, and providing a token-based community for user contributions, Kaito is positioning itself as the go-to search engine for the crypto industry.
As blockchain technology becomes more widely adopted and utilized, Kaito’s search capabilities will become increasingly valuable, not just for crypto investors, but for anyone looking to access information on the blockchain. With its successful seed round and notable investors, Kaito is well-positioned to continue to innovate and make strides in the cryptocurrency industry.
