June 18 (Reuters) - Genspark, an artificial intelligence

search startup founded by former Baidu executives, has raised

$60 million in an oversized seed funding as it joins a series of

challengers to take on Google's dominance in the

search market.

The funding is led by Singapore-based fund Lanchi Ventures

and valued the startup, currently without revenue, at $260

million. Lanchi Ventures, formerly BlueRun Ventures China,

rebranded last year to distance itself from its Silicon Valley

origin BlueRun Ventures.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Genspark says its

search engine uses a variety of AI model providers to index and

summarize information. It differentiates by using multiple

specialized AI agents to generate new, customized pages every

query, aiming to provide useful results on one page.

Its CEO Eric Jing led Baidu's ( BIDU ) AI-powered

smartphone and smart speaker Xiaodu unit until last October.

Jing said the team of 20 people are split between Palo Alto,

California and Singapore, with the plans to open a new office in

Seattle.

Focusing on serving the U.S. market, Genspark is free to use

and may explore paid subscription in the future. It uses a

variety of large language models to deal with tasks, from open

source ones such as Meta's Llama to OpenAI's GPT models.

Genspark's funding comes at a time when the search engine

market is experiencing renewed competition, as AI models show

news ways for people to gather and access information online.

You.com, another search engine, is close to raising another $50

million in funding. Perplexity, which is already unicorn, is

also in talks for additional funding.