From search to super agent: Genspark takes big AI leap

July 17 was supposed to be a dire day for agentic AI startups. That’s when OpenAI finally launched its long-rumored ChatGPT Agent, which allows users to automate complex tasks – the very thing companies like Genspark, Manus, and Pokee have been building toward.

But instead of rolling over, all three firms took to social media to show how their agents could outperform OpenAI.

Genspark went further with a million-dollar side-by-side challenge, offering rewards to anyone who could prove ChatGPT Agent was better than Genspark’s Super Agent.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

The startup framed the challenge as a show of confidence in its tech, positioning Super Agent as capable of going head-to-head with OpenAI.

In the first round, Genspark paid out $100 each for 429 winning cases. But rather than backing off, it doubled the prize money and opened the contest to any AI tool.

It’s the latest David versus Goliath tech fight, indeed. But in this case, David is armed with US$160 million in total disclosed funding. Meanwhile, Goliath has just secured US$8.3 billion in new capital.

At US$530 million valuation, Genspark sits alongside Manus as one of the most highly valued startups in the emerging market of general-purpose AI agents.

From search engine to agent OS

Genspark hasn’t always been a do-everything agent. When it launched in mid-2024, it was poised to be an AI-native search engine – something to replace blue links with curated, multimedia answer pages.

It looked more like a cross between Perplexity and the now-defunct Neeva. But for co-founders Kay Zhu and Eric Jing, both former leads in Baidu’s search division, it made sense given their strong background in search engines. Zhu had also worked on search at Google, while Jing did a stint at Microsoft’s Bing.

By February 2025, Genspark claimed it had more than 2 million monthly active users. Its traction was strong enough to secure a US$100 million series A that month, following a US$60 million seed round in 2024.

But in a rather surprising twist, Genspark killed off its search product just two months later.

In its place, the company rolled out Super Agent – an AI workspace that can write documents, generate decks, plan itineraries, respond to Slack messages, and summarize 6-hour Zoom meetings. It integrates with tools like Google Calendar, Notion, and Microsoft 365 and can chain them together into full workflows.

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