Cake Browser wants to reinvent mobile browsers using swiping

Cake's fresh take on the mobile browser allows users to find web content more quickly by swiping through search results as web pages, instead of tapping back and forth between a list of result links and resulting pages. 

At a glance

Startup: Cake

Founder: Jase Bosarge

Year it was founded: 2016

Where it is based: Utah, US

The problem it solves: Swipeable mobile browser

Sector: Mobile app

Funding raised: $5 million 

The idea for Cake began when Founder Jase Bosarge started experimenting with different presentation styles for search results that could help facilitate academic research. Jase found that if he suppressed the search index, the web browser would immediately preload page results, saving users a significant amount of time as they quickly swiped through results to find the right content. 

At the same time, he met with a few advisors and then-SVP of product at Ancestry.com, Kendall Hulet, who would eventually become Cake’s CEO. Together they noticed there was a major lack of innovation when it came to the mobile browser; even for giants like Safari and Chrome, mobile browsing still seemed startlingly close to desktop browsing in the late 1990s. These mobile browsers returned text-based search results that made sense in a pre-touch screen, pre-high-speed internet era, but were antiquated in a mobile world that’s increasingly visual and tactile. 

Once Jase, Kendall and the Cake team applied search index suppression to a mobile browser and added swiping gestures, Cake was born. Since then, the Cake team has been hard at work to create a faster, swipeable browser built specifically for mobile. 

Cake's fresh take on the mobile browser allows users to find web content more quickly by swiping through search results as web pages, instead of tapping back and forth between a list of result links and resulting pages. The app does this by suppressing the search index and immediately preloading search results so users can quickly swipe through content. 

“The idea for Cake began as an attempt to speed up academic research. I’m amazed by the information you can find on the Internet, but I always found the Search Engine Results Page a painfully slow experience — you click a link, wait for the page to load, click back to the index, click another link...on and on, until you find what you’re looking for. So much unnecessary work — why not just start by looking at the results?” says Jase.

Cake is the first swipeable browser built specifically for mobile. In addition to faster, swipeable search results, Cake’s mobile app includes the following features:

● Broader search results: Cake allows users to search across categories and multiple services at once, which pulls more results in images, videos, news, and shopping.

● Personalised searches: In addition to allowing users to choose their preferred search engine (Google or Bing), Cake lets users to choose and reorder their favourite sites within a category (such as news, videos, images, or online shopping) to get personalised search results.

● Slices: Cake helps users cut through the clutter of generic search results by suggesting curated collections of websites that are most relevant to their search term. 

Cake was founded in 2016 and launched in January of 2018. In the first 48 hours, Cake saw 25,000 downloads and has since then maintained a 4.7-star rating in the Apple App Store. Cake does not generate revenue yet. 

In the near term, Cake is focussed on making the best user experience possible for mobile browsers. That includes improving the way ads work in mobile search. Cake has an opportunity to re-imagine the way paid placements work on mobile that is more user-friendly and also more effective at connecting the user to the advertiser in a meaningful way. 

Cake just announced $5 million in funding (led by Peak Ventures with participation from Pelion Venture Partners and Kickstart Seed Fund), ahead of a Series A the company plans to raise in 2019. 

“There are a lot of things consumers have come to expect in a mobile browser, and we plan to make several feature enhancements to match that high standard. For instance, in the short term, we plan to make integrations with 1Password and LastPass; build enhancements that make filling out forms easier; and make Cake even faster on devices that are typically slower. From there, we will continue to innovate to make Cake the best mobile browser for consumers,” shares Jase. “The internet is not finished being built, and neither is the web browser —even for Cake. We’ve launched the first swipeable mobile browser, and we won’t stop improving it.”

Website: https://cakebrowser.com