Brave

Founded in 2015 and received a total of US $210m in funding, $14.1 raised during the first three years and $186.9m since 2019.  Brave is a free and open-sourced Privacy based Browser that blocks adverts and replaces them with their own; they also block website trackers. Brave's features include Brave Talk, Wallet, opt-in rewards and their newly launched search engine, which was acquired through the purchase of Tailcat in 2021. They claim their Index is now independent of other big tech indexes and only use Bing for their image searches.   

The search engine uses a Web Discovery Project, an opt-in feature that allows users to contribute anonymous data about their searches and web page visits. Brave uses people's anonymous data to help them rank the search results for relevance. Local searches use your IP address to identify your general location without storing it. 

The Brave Browser currently has 50m active users, with Brave Search reaching 2.5 billion searches since launch in 2021, an impressive stat considering it took DDG 5 years to hit the 2.5 billion. Their current annualized forecast is 5 billion queries  In 2022 Brave Search results will include paid ads which users will receive in the form of notifications and in-browser sponsored content. Users will be able to subscribe to their premium service (monthly US$3) to receive ad-free searches. 

According to Similarweb.com, 39% of their browser traffic comes from the US, next is India with 4%, then the UK, France and Canada. 75% of their users are male and 25% female, with the bulk of their users in two age categories a) 18-24 yrs. old : 28%, b) 25-24 yrs old : 31%.