You.com is an AI search infrastructure company that gives AI agents access to real-time web search through its APIs. Pulse 2.0 interviewed You.com CTO Saahil Jain to learn more.
Saahil Jain’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Jain said:
“I completed my undergraduate studies in computer science at Columbia, then went to Stanford for my master’s, where I was fortunate to join the Machine Learning Group under Professor Andrew Ng. My research focused on deep learning and NLP in resource-constrained settings, particularly healthcare—the core challenge being that most ML research assumes you have abundant labeled data, which hospitals and clinical environments often don’t. My research has been published at leading ML conferences like NeurIPS, and has accumulated over 10,000 citations at this point, which I’m proud of. We also publicly released various ML models, methods, and datasets so other researchers and hospitals could freely use them; I appreciated being part of an open-source movement at Stanford that was committed to democratizing AI research in medicine.
I joined You.com in December 2020 as a founding engineer. The CEO Richard Socher had this conviction that language models were about to fundamentally change search, and I agreed; I spent the next five years building the search and AI infrastructure from scratch, grew into our Head of AI, and was recently named CTO.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Jain shared:
“Back in 2020, Richard saw that language models were about to get much more powerful and zeroed in on search as an ideal target for AI disruption (which most people disagreed with). I happened to agree, and joined You.com in December 2020 as a founding member of the engineering team.”
“We started deploying large language models in a search context as early as September 2021, when everyone was still used to getting a list of 10 blue links. We were rethinking search entirely, using AI to provide summarized, synthesized answers instead of just links.”
“ChatGPT’s public launch in November 2022 changed everything. Everyone was suddenly excited about conversational AI. Everyone quickly realized the fundamental issue with the knowledge cutoff. It couldn’t tell you today’s weather or last night’s game score because it was trained on old data and completely disconnected from the web.”
“We got to work solving that problem, and just weeks after ChatGPT’s launch, we were the first to connect LLMs to real-time web data with verifiable citations. That resolved two critical problems at once: outdated information and AI hallucinations.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Jain explained:
“We’ve built search infrastructure that makes AI agents accurate and reliable. Our main offering is a suite of APIs for developers; we offer Search, Contents, and Research APIs that allow teams to build agents that don’t hallucinate, don’t go stale, and don’t break under production workloads. Our Search API handles over 1 billion queries monthly for companies like DuckDuckGo, Windsurf, Harvey, and Databricks. In our benchmarks, we outperform both Google’s search API and Bing’s (now depreciated) API on accuracy and speed.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Jain noted:
“We started as a consumer AI search engine, but realized the bigger opportunity was building the search infrastructure that powers AI agents with reliable web context.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Jain cited:
“We’ve made tremendous progress over the years, but I’m particularly proud of a few moments.”
“In 2022 we were the first to integrate LLMs with real-time web search, solving the knowledge cutoff problem that made chatbots unreliable. Over the next couple years, we built API infrastructure that now serves over 1 billion monthly queries.”
“In February 2025, we released ARI, our deep research agent leveraging our search APIs to synthesize 500+ sources into comprehensive reports with verifiable citations, so knowledge workers can use them for real tasks. And in September 2025, we raised a $100M Series C and became a unicorn with a $1.5B valuation.
I’m particularly excited about our Research API, which we launched in February this year to expand our deep research capabilities. It ranked first on DeepSearchQA, a 900-prompt benchmark evaluating difficult multi-step information-seeking tasks across 17 fields. We’re proud that the Research API earned an 83.67% accuracy score, which is the highest reported in the industry to date.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Jain highlighted:
“A partnership worth mentioning is Databricks, which integrated our Search API directly into its Unity Catalog. That means any enterprise building AI agents on Databricks can now access real-time web data via our API without leaving the platform, with credentials secured, requests audited, and access governed by Databricks’ built-in controls.
“I’d be remiss not to note that You.com is one of the default search providers for OpenAI’s open-weight GPT models. DuckDuckGo and Windsurf are also key adopters of our Search API; they use it to serve breaking news to visitors and give coding agents access to current repositories and documentation, respectively.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Jain assessed:
“We’re building infrastructure for the agentic era, when AI agents will browse the internet more than humans do. Current search infrastructure was built for humans to click links. AI agents need something completely different: deep, contextual information from both private and public data to make decisions and take actions.”
“The TAM is essentially ‘every company building AI applications that need accurate, current information.’ That spans everything from legal research (Harvey) to developer tools (Windsurf) to enterprise analytics (Databricks) to search engines (DuckDuckGo). As AI becomes critical infrastructure rather than a novelty, the need for accuracy and reliability becomes non-negotiable.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Jain concluded:
“We’re focused on becoming the default search infrastructure layer for enterprise AI, the same way AWS became default infrastructure for cloud computing. Near-term, that means scaling our API offerings as more companies realize they need reliable infrastructure rather than trying to build their own. “
“Longer-term, it’s about establishing new standards for accuracy and trust in AI systems. As agents handle increasingly important decisions, the infrastructure underneath needs to be bulletproof. We want ‘powered by You.com’ to be a sign of the highest reliability.”
