Disrupt Winner Vurb Raises $8 Million To Steal Mobile Search From Google

The conundrum of mobile is you either use one convenient app that is mediocre at doing many things, or you have to discover and hop between a flotilla of single-purpose apps. Vurb wants to solve this for mobile search by aggregating utility from top third-party apps so you can make decisions rather than click links. Today the 2014 Disrupt NY Battlefield winner announced it’s raised a meaty $8 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures to play David to Google’s Goliath in search.

Vurb is still rolling out its private beta to a big waitlist, and must figure out how to uproot one of our most ingrained digital behaviors. But if everything else changed in the mobile age, why shouldn’t search?

Cards, Not Links

Vurb’s search engine ditches the list of blue links for content-rich cards cobbled together from factual information (like Google’s answer boxes) and third-parties like Yelp, Foursquare, OpenTable, YouTube, Spotify, IMDB, Netflix, Amazon, AngelList, and Crunchbase.

For now it’s focused on places, movies, and media, but is looking to expand to many more verticals including travel and shopping. Vurb tries to anticipate the most common reasons for a search, and splay out the info you might need to take action. Vurb founder and CEO Bobby Lo tells me “Search is a very poor experience on mobile. You have to figure out which app has the right information and have to jump app-to-app to cross-reference information. It’s a really painful process.”

Vurb is different. Search for a movie, and you’ll get IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Flixster scores, nearby showtimes, trailers, cast breakdown, reviews. But say you choose a theater and click through to buy tickets for a specific showtime. One more click of Vurb’s Nearby Places button will show you top restaurants and bars close to the theater that you can filter by type, price, and more variables. Find a nice eatery and Vurb will pull up menus, maps, and an OpenTable booking button.

And you never had to type another word or pop open a bunch of tabs — two actions that are clumsy on mobile.


On the web, juggling services from Google results is a bit easier, but Vurb goes a step further with the ability to save individual cards or whole stacks of them you’ve browsed through. These modernized folders of bookmarks can be referenced later or shared with friends, which is great for collaborative group decision-making.