UAE-Born Search Engine meekd.com Scores its First Round of Seed Funding

Dubai-based online search startup, meekd.com, has announced that it has raised its first round of seed funding, with the investment coming via UAE-based film production and distribution company, Xmovies, alongside an angel investor.

Launched in February 2019 by parent company, AlphaNumeric Inc - which is based on the Dubai Technology Entrepreneur Campus - the search engine registers more than 200,000 daily searches and is currently ranked as the number one Emirati startup online by global web ranking platform, Alexa. It’s remarkable success has been attributed to its approach, in that it never prioritises paid and sponsored content ahead of organic search results.

Another unique feature of the search engine is that its algorithm works off ‘user votes’, a model that goes against the likes of Google. In August of this year, meekd.com launched a new ‘Trending News’ function that brings together different reports and articles on one ‘News Card’ for a more efficient and intuitive user experience.“For example if the trending story right now is ‘US elections’, you will find articles written by CNN, Fox News, Gulf News, and others, covering this specific story in one news card,” co-founder and CEO, Muhannad Al Darrai, explains. “When searching for some specific topics on meekd.com, we show our users a complete summary about that specific topic in text, photos and videos. For video search, we show a variety of results from different videos and social media websites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. We are working on refining further the video results to be as relevant as possible to the user’s query now that we’ve figured out how to scrape data from these websites, which no search engine is currently doing.”

The undisclosed funding will be used to expand the team, as well as upgrade the startup’s infrastructure in order to elevate product innovation. Two innovations that are already in the pipeline include weather and dictionary features.