Alibaba, SoftBank Leading $60 Million Investment Round In App Search Startup Quixey: Report

China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Japan’s SoftBank Corp. are leading a $60 million investment in Quixey Inc., a Mountain View, California startup that helps people find apps and developers make more money from their effort, Re/code reported. If the deal gets done, it would value Quixey at $600 million.

Quixey, an app search engine provider, has also developed data analytics-based techniques to help developers better monetize their apps. The company has raised $75 million since its inception in 2009.

Quixey’s idea is to help developers focus on providing greater value to a smaller set of users of their apps -- including daily active users and monthly active users -- rather than merely depending on installs-driven advertising and in-app purchases.

One of the ways Quixey is attempting to do this is by helping developers modify or build their apps to be capable of handling “deep linking” which facilitates cross-app actions. In a context-based scenario, one example on Quixey’s blog is, a table reservation at a restaurant made using an app could also bring up a cab-hailing app.

Other investors include an investment arm of billionaire financier George Soros, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., GGV Capital and Twitter Inc. Alibaba and GGV are existing investors alongside Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, according to the report.