Quixey Looks to Move Beyond Finding Apps to In-App Search

For some time now, well-funded startup Quixey has been hinting that its vision goes beyond helping smartphone owners find the right apps.

In an interview last year, CEO Tomer Kagan said that the company’s goal was to develop the ability to search for information within apps. At Mobile World Congress, Quixey is discussing how it plans to do that, essentially by allowing app makers to specify the type of information they are capable of serving up and then making the information available to Quixey’s engine.

Too much information is locked within apps these days, Kagan said.

“Our goal is to reopen the Web and get developers to break down that walled garden,” Kagan told Re/code. “If things continue as is, the Web is in real jeopardy.”

For now, the process of making information searchable by Quixey is a manual task for both it and app developers. As a result, Quixey is starting with a single category: Food. As the process gets shifted to an automatic one, Quixey hopes to open up to more — and eventually to all — apps.

Quixey, which has grown to 120 employees, received $50 million in funding last October from a group of investors, including China’s Alibaba. It also raised $20 million in a 2012 funding round.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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