YC-backed startup represents search for the next generation – visual, conversational and factually accurate

Andi, which is building search for the next generation, announced today that after a months-long stealth period in which it attracted 50,000 users purely by word of mouth, it’s now generally available to all.

Andi co-founder Angela Hoover said, “Gen-Z hates Google. To us, search is broken. We live on our phones in messaging apps with visual feeds like TikTok and Instagram. Traditional search engine results are overwhelmed with ads, SEO spam and clutter. We hate the invasive creepy ads, and how Google is Big Brother and surveils everything. Gen-Z is so desperate for an alternative that we’re using TikTok as a search engine.”

Gen Z users want a visual, conversational interface on mobile. Andi is providing that by bringing generative AI to search.

While other generative AI search tools (such as ChatGPT) exist, they are known for presenting inaccurate information. Andi doesn’t provide random generated text – it filters for high-quality content sources and provides accurate summarized answers with links to those sources.

“There has been a scramble to use text generative AI in search applications, but what Andi is doing is fundamentally unique,” said Lorenzo Thione, Managing Director of Gaingels, one of Andi’s investors. “Instead of trying to fix search, they scrapped the traditional model and built a generative AI search assistant from the ground up. Andi was doing all of this before the release of ChatGPT, and Andi’s technology is at least a year ahead of everyone else’s. We are confident Andi’s conversational search approach will appeal not only to Gen Z but to anyone searching for information from a mobile or home-enabled device.”

Andi is pushing the boundaries of generative AI, using semantic search, large language models with prompt chaining, and live data from APIs to answer questions and summarize information grounded by multiple sources. It provides accurate answers in seconds in a TLDR type of format. No other startup can do all of this and match Andi’s high accuracy.

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Andi’s newest features and key differentiators are:

• Q+A: next-generation factual question answering and explanations.
• More than text generation: Andi generates whole emails, reports, and code files. Responses are accompanied by links, documents and full details when needed. For example, ask Andi to write you an email and it gives you a button to open the email it creates in your email program, or the document in Google Docs or Word.
• Fast UX: that breaks down responses progressively, so you get back initial results quickly while Andi does more detailed research.
• Summarize button: you can not only visit the source of the information with a click, but you can also read it in a clean reader view, or get a simple summary of what any page on the Internet is about.

Andi is free for consumers, and does not log or track searches at all, giving users complete anonymity. Enterprise plans are in the works – dozens of companies have already reached out to Andi asking for an embedded B2B search solution.

Andi co-founders Hoover and Jed White met at the Denver airport, where they connected about how search was broken, and what it would take to fix it. Hoover was a Gen Z college student who had just finished a backpacking trip after working in construction and at Microsoft. White was an Australian AI hacker. The two decided to start a company and fix search using generative AI.

Andi has raised $2.5M in funding to date from investors including Gaingels, Goodwater Capital, K20 Fund and Y Combinator.

“The future of search is a conversational AI assistant that provides quick, accurate summarized results,” said Hoover. “Andi is delivering that now.”

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