DuckDuckGo injects $100M in secondary investment

The internet privacy company DuckDuckGo has revealed it is injecting $100 million+ in secondary investment last year from a combination of existing and new investors. There is quite an impressive lineup of investors including Omer’s Ventures, Thrive, GP Bullhound, Impact America Fund and WhatsApp founder Brian Acton. The most interesting investor includes the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee.

Although the non-tracking search engine provider has been profitable since 2014, DuckDuckGo has said that the secondary investment has allowed some of its early employees and investors to draw out a large sum of their equity whilst boosting its financial position. The last time they had a venture capital raise was in 2018 following a $10 million from Canadian pension fund Omer’s ventures. This was accepted by the search engine company in a bid to help support growth objectives including internationally which proved to be a financially positive move.

The 12-year-old company had only two other funding rounds previously which picked up $3M in VC in 2011.
The metrics speak for themselves. For example, the monthly traffic has increased by 55% allowing DDG to comfortably rank number 2 for search engines on mobile internationally. This is due to the app being downloaded over 50 million times over the course of the last year which is proven to be the highest in all the previous years.

What can you expect from DuckDuckGo in the coming weeks? You will be pleased to hear they are adding beta versions of new free privacy protections. This includes a cross-platform email privacy solution and app tracker blocking for Android devices. At the end of this year, they have plans to release a beta version for the first-ever Duck Duck Go desktop app.