You.com Secures $150M Funding, Pivots to Enterprise AI Solutions

You.com raises $100M to help developers build AI applications - SiliconANGLE

Artificial intelligence startup SuSea Inc., which does business as You.com, today announced that it has raised $150 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. Cox Enterprises led the Series C round. It was joined by several returning backers including Georgian, Norwest and Salesforce Ventures. You.com co-founders Bryan McCann (left) and Richard Socher (right) held senior research roles at Salesforce Inc. before launching the company in 2020. You.com's first product was a search engine for the consumer market. The service allowed users to scroll search results not only vertically but also horizontally. The interface included a dedicated section for finding open-source code files. Last September, You.com raised $50 million in funding and started refocusing on the enterprise market. Its product portfolio now comprises a collection of application programming interfaces that companies can use to build AI applications. You.com says that its APIs fetch data faster and more accurately than Google LLC's search API for developers . One You.com service, the Research API, equips applications with the ability to turn data from the public web into reports. It can pull content from up to 30 sources in response to a user query. Customers may use a second You.com offering, Data API, to enrich the information their AI applications pull from the web with internal data. For workloads that prioritize output generation speed over response length, the company offers a service called Smart API. It lends itself to tasks such as powering e-commerce chatbots. There's also a general-purpose Web and News Search API that supports a broader range of data retrieval use cases. Enterprises with advanced requirements can hire You.com to build custom APIs and AI agents. According to the company, its engineers have built agents for organizations with billions of users. You.com's software is powered by large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and other AI providers. It also uses Meta Platform's Llama series of open-source LLMs. When users enter a prompt, the company's platform automatically finds the algorithm best suited to generate a response. "Today, we process over 1 billion queries monthly with our API for companies like DuckDuckGo, Windsurf, Harvey, and others across technology, e-commerce, financial services, media, manufacturing, hospitality and more," Socher and McCann wrote in a blog post announcing its new funding round.

You.com Valued at $1.5 Billion Amid Shift From AI Search | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company's latest funding round values it at $1.5 billion, and is happening amid its ongoing shift from consumer search to more general AI services, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Sept. 3). The company was founded in 2020 as an AI-powered search engine by Richard Socher, who had been chief scientist for Salesforce. In the intervening years, the AI search space has heated up, with competition from the likes of Google and Perplexity. According to Bloomberg, You.com last year began a shift toward helping companies adopt AI, a transition that was happening when the startup raised $50 million. Socher told the news outlet that much of AI's benefits have yet to be realized. "I think AI is so hard to navigate because on the one hand, it will change every industry and it's very obvious," he said. "On the other hand, it's not going to happen overnight." The report notes that while consumers can sign up for You.com's services, the company focuses on selling search application programming interfaces (APIs), which let software applications communicate with each other. You.com also says it processes almost 1 billion queries per month, with DuckDuckGo, Databricks Inc. and legal startup Harvey AI among its customers. The new funding will help the firm expand its product offerings and double its current staff of about 100 people, open an office in San Francisco and expand its presence in New York City. In other artificial intelligence news, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster recently offered a summation of PYMNTS Intelligence's research into the industry since March 2024, based on more than 1,000 unique observations and 100,000 data points from companies with $1 billion or more in yearly revenue. Over those 18 months, the research has found a steady shift in the use of generative AI from simplifying routine tasks to becoming an embedded part of strategic functions within companies. In some cases, that means CFOs using gen AI to model complex financial scenarios, analyze working capital positions and detect anomalies in millions of transactions. Other times, it means chief product officers turning to AI to negotiate contracts with better visibility into supplier performance and model risk. "Nearly all (96%) executives at the enterprise level in our studies report favorable positive results, up significantly from even this time a year ago," Webster wrote. "That's even though the technology is still in its very earliest innings of potential. And by everyone's admission still has a long way to go."