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Back in June 2024 — an eternity in the fast-moving generative AI sector — a startup founded by Microsoft, Google, and Baidu alumni called MainFunc launched its first product, Genspark, an AI search engine.
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Since then, the collision of generative AI, which can create new content on demand, and search, which traditionally retrieves it, has only intensified across the industry. Google recently added Search grounding to its Gemini AI Studio and of course, OpenAI just integrated its powerful realtime web SearchGPT directly into its signature chatbot product ChatGPT.
But now MainFunc — powered by a $60 million seed round led by Singapore-based Lanchi Ventures and supported by global angel investors — is hitting back, teaming up with AI model maker Anthropic to launch “Distill Web” for Genspark, a tool designed to make financial reports more understandable and accessible.
The tool launched earlier this week and powers a range of features on Genspark’s AI search engine, including Genspark Finance.
Overall, very simply, Distill Web gives users the ability to look up 300,000-and-counting public companies and generate polished, readable, engaging financial reports on their earnings — complete with colorful graphics and charts — turning this complex financial data into visual, easy-to-use formats for a wide audience.
Whether you want to see how Apple is doing after the launch of the new iPhone lineup, or how Google is weathering the AI wars, Distill Web can generate reports that show off these and many other companies’ financial reports, automatically highlighting interesting outliers and trends. It’s like Yahoo or Google Finance on steroids.
Screenshots of Genspark Finance tool.
“We think that in the AI era, search will become an underlying tool for agents,” said Eric Jing, co-founder and CEO of MainFunc, and the former Chief Product Manager of Search & Corporate VP at Baidu. “People won’t come to search just for a query or a list of links—they’ll come to complete tasks. By combining different tools, agents can do much more than search alone.”
With more than 1 million monthly users gained in just four months through word-of-mouth, Genspark.ai is already establishing itself as a significant player in AI-powered data accessibility. The new update underscores its broader vision to redefine how users interact with data.
Making financial information more accessible to those outside finance
“Our target audience isn’t financial professionals—it’s everyday users who want to understand financial data from public companies.” Jing told VentureBeat. “Eventually, we hope to help people with private company data, too.”
Distill Web’s flagship feature, Corporate Earnings Visual Reports, offers a new way to view financial information.
These AI-powered visualizations turn intricate company earnings in …