This upstart search engine just got funding to challenge Google across Southeast Asia

Vietnam is one of a handful of markets around the world where Google faces a strong competitor in search. That’s because a startup that emerged in 2013 is aiming to usurp Google as the top search service in the nation.

That startup, Coc Coc, revealed today that it has secured US$14 million in funding to help with its growth and technology (update: The funding amount was previously undisclosed. Then Coc Coc revealed the figure to us). The investment comes from Germany-based company Hubert Burda Media.

Co-founder and CEO Victor Lavrenko says that the money will help the upstart search engine “roll out to the rest of Southeast Asia.” No specific plan has been revealed yet.

A Coc Coc representative tells Tech in Asia that the search engine got an average of 2.9 million searches per day in Vietnam in December, which grew to a daily median of 3.7 million in January. That’s up from about one million per day when we last asked in October 2013. The search engine now claims to have 8.7 million monthly active users, which is backed up by ComScore’s numbers showing eight million monthly active users. We’ve contacted Google to try elicit such figures for Vietnam (update: A Google representative in Asia declined to reveal country-specific data).

Alexa’s rankings indicate that Coc Coc is the number one website in Vietnam, having surpassed Google a while ago. But such rankings are not a sure-fire way of gauging a site’s true popularity – especially as there are many alternative ways to access Google searches rather than just visiting the Google homepage.

Shift to mobile

Just like Google, Coc Coc has other products, such as a desktop-based web browser and an advertising platform. A Coc Coc representative says that the Coc Coc browser, available for Windows and OS X, now pulls in 4.1 million searches each day via its search box, but some of those go to other search engines if a user changes the default settings.

Coc Coc’s search engine, pictured on February 4, 2015.

The startup says it plans to develop a mobile version of its web browser this year as the country goes increasingly mobile-first and smartphone adoption picks up. Vietnam, with a population of 90 million, has 40 million active internet users and 32.4 million mobile web users.

Coc Coc was co-founded by three Vietnamese founders along with Lavrenko, an experienced entrepreneur from Russia. Lavrenko told Tech in Asia in February 2013 that Coc Coc stems from an experimental search engine he created in Russia, called Nigma.ru. “It gave us good experience and a good team […] [W]e’re not just a startup with an idea or a weak prototype. We already have the engine and many experts, including current and former Google employees, and are quite enthusiastic about our search quality,” he explained.

Google is also facing competition from China’s Baidu, which expanded its search engine to Brazil in mid-2014, and will soon roll out in Egypt and Thailand as well.

See: Xiaomi postpones new country launches until 2015