Do@ Shortcuts Mobile Search With New iPhone App, Raises $7M

Do@ launches today a mobile search application for the iPhone that tries to minimize the time and effort needed to find information while using a phone.

The company has created mobile-optimized search results pages for hundreds of Web sites, often with their collaboration. A search query on Do@ brings up 15 or so of these search results pages that users can swipe through.

So a user who searches “Bridesmaids” would see results pages for Fandango and Flixster and other sites devoted to researching, watching and reading about movies. A search for “sushi” will produce pages of results from sites like Yelp and Foodspotting that are targeted to the user’s location. Normally, a user would have to navigate to these pages one by one and reiterate the search, which can be tedious and frustrating on a phone.

“The mobile version of a Web site is not about something that’s the right smaller font,” said Do@ co-founder Ami Ben-David. “It should be more like an app than a Web site.”

Do@ also tries to make search quicker by disambiguating searches with categories such as @news, @shopping and @music. So a search for “iPad” in @shopping would bring up different sites than one in @technews.

Tel Aviv-based Do@ has completed two rounds of funding: $1.5 million from angels, and $7 million in a new Series A round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and including DFJ Tamir Fishman and BRM Capital.

Why so much funding before even launching? “We’re going into a market controlled by really large companies: Google, Bing, etc,” Ben-David said. “It’s not about the money, but about being in a market where if it catches on we may have to scale really quickly.”

We’ve been tracking Do@ for a while now while the company has been in stealth. They’re expected to present later today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, and the iPhone app should be available then. We’ll update with more information as we can.