Today AI-based productivity engine You.com announced a $50 million Series B funding round led by Georgian. This funding round included participation from Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), DuckDuckGo, and Day One Ventures, bringing You.com’s total funding to $99 million.
Since launching in November 2021, You.com served 1 billion queries and has millions of active users across hedge funds, tech unicorns, and multiple publicly traded companies. Its ARR has grown by 500% since January 2024.
You.com was launched by Richard Socher (former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and the fourth most-cited NLP researcher) and Bryan McCann (former lead AI research scientist at Salesforce). And they were the first to embed large language models (LLMs) into a search experience before ChatGPT.
In 2017 – while at Salesforce – they had invented contextualized word vectors, leading to the biggest improvements in search since Google Search. And its 2018 DecaNLP paper pioneered prompt engineering and helped the field see it was possible to train a single model for multiple tasks, a milestone acknowledged by GPT’s creators at OpenAI.
Tech giants often struggle with accuracy, including factual errors in product demos to misleading AI-generated content in search results. And the current AI solutions often are not reliable and fail to cite sources properly.
Starting now, You.com is introducing multiplayer AI with its Team plan, moving beyond just a single-worker mode to a collaborative, team-oriented experience. And You.com already offers advanced proprietary AI agents for research and problem-solving — third-party benchmarked for unparalleled accuracy and enables people create custom AI agents on top of any AI model for any task.
With user conversations with early adopters, You.com also identified AI sprawl as a major challenge, with people paying over $1,000 annually across numerous subscriptions to access various models. Businesses need help to keep up with rapid advancements in LLMs, and new and better models frequently emerge, driving demand for an all-in-one AI platform to avoid vendor lock-in. And You.com addresses this by offering access to the latest and most powerful LLMs, enhanced with live web access for unparalleled accuracy, and automatically routing a user’s query to the best model for the job.
KEY QUOTES:
“When we first started You.com, we saw an opportunity to reinvent the gateway to everyone’s online journey. Billions of questions were being answered every day with a list of blue links, but our users wanted more. We built You.com to enhance productivity, inspire new thinking, and develop a deeper understanding of the world through human-AI collaboration. Our AI agents help millions of knowledge workers be more productive, whether it’s through fast, accurate answers, research and analysis, problem-solving, or content creation.”
“It’s easy to make a quick prototype with an LLM. It’s difficult to make them accurate at scale. Our focus at You.com has been making LLMs more trustworthy. In December 2022, we were the first consumer-facing LLM with internet access, providing up-to-date answers with verifiable citations. Since then, we’ve built an entire AI operating system that’s model agnostic to provide the most comprehensive and accurate responses.”
– Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of You.com
“At Georgian, our investment team experienced the time savings You.com provides for the extensive market research and synthesis work we do every day – we were particularly impressed by the agentic capabilities of You.com’s ‘Research Agent.’ When Georgian’s AI Lab diligenced the technical strength behind You.com’s AI productivity engine, we saw the platform’s B2B potential. And, we believe that You.com’s deep bench of talent and technical expertise will continue to position the company ahead of competitors in a quickly evolving market.”
– Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian
