UK-based mobile “social search” engine startup Taptu has secured $9.86m in Series B funding from existing investors 3i and Paris-based VC Sofinnova. The company has also brought in a new COO to work on monetizing the search engine. Taptu competes to some extent with Jumptap which has $73m in funding, as well as Google and Yahoo on mobile search. However it takes a social approach to search – allowing users to share search results with friends via email, text messaging and Twitter, plus it has an API for 3rd party sites, one of which is Moblr.

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