If you are like most people, there are but two reasons you pick up your mobile phone. The first is when you want to do something specific, like send an email. The second is when you are bored. Nikhil Chandhok wants to figure out which one it is.

On Wednesday, Mr. Chandhok, a former product manager at YouTube who later worked at Google’s venture capital arm, revealed his new start-up, Bento, a mobile application that aims to become the first place people go when they pick up their mobile phones. The company has gotten $2 million in venture capital from investor like First Round Capital, Social+Capital and Google Ventures.

The app, which is only available on phones running Google’s Android software, is a kind of second home screen in which the familiar grid-like structure of icons has been replaced with a stream of “cards” that shuffle around based on what it thinks you want to do. Bento’s pitch is that, over time, it can get to know you better than you do, by juggling music, food recommendations or cab services like Uber.

As if anyone needed a reminder, mobile phones contain a fearful amount of information about people and their habits. But because apps have limited access to your data, each new app has to acquaint itself with each new user.

Say, for instance, that you are a heavy user of Spotify, the streaming service. Through years of twice-weekly gym trips, you have let the service in on the secret that you love eclectic mixes that range to from Tegan And Sara to Scandinavian death metal to anything by The Replacements (except for everything after “Pleased to Meet Me”).

Then say you want to try a new music service, like Pandora. Now that app has to spend the next several years learning how weird you are. Bento’s idea is to even this out by storing the information on your phone and sharing it, becoming a sort of matchmaker between a user’s preferences and services that want to know them (and sell them things).

“Your phone has this incredible amount of information about you but doesn’t seem to do anything special with it,” said Mr. Chandhok.

More broadly, Bento is one of number of start-ups that are trying to re-imagine how Internet search will work in a world of mobile phones. Each of these apps has a different solution, but the common problem they are trying to solve is that the Internet has become bifurcated between the open, searchable web and the walled-off mobile applications where people increasingly spend their time.

“The mobile world doesn’t care if you’re a web site or an app,” said Mr. Chandhok. “We are trying to construct an interface that’s agnostic of that.”