You.com Raises $50 Million to Make Knowledge Workers More Productive

By Business Wire On Sep 4, 2024

With 1B queries and millions of users, You.com is introducing AI agents and multiplayer AI for enterprise teams

You.com, an AI-powered productivity engine, announced a $50 million Series B funding round led by Georgian, a growth-stage B2B investor. The round included participation from Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, SBVA, DuckDuckGo, and Day One Ventures, bringing You.com’s total funding to $99 million. Since launching in November 2021, You.com has 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.

“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.”

You.com was founded 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. They were the first to embed large language models (LLMs) into a search experience before ChatGPT. In 2017, while at Salesforce, they invented contextualized word vectors, leading to the biggest improvements in search since Google Search. Their 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.

“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,” said Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of You.com.

Inaccuracy remains the number one challenge for AI adoption in the workplace. Even tech giants struggle with accuracy, including factual errors in product demos to misleading AI-generated content in search results. Current AI solutions often aren’t reliable and fail to cite sources properly.

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Socher added: “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.”

Beginning today, You.com is introducing multiplayer AI with its Team plan, moving beyond just a single-worker mode to a collaborative, team-oriented experience. You.com already offers advanced proprietary AI agents for research and problem-solving — third-party benchmarked for unparalleled accuracy — and lets people create custom AI agents on top of any AI model for any task.

Research Agent: In minutes, the agent executes multiple searches from one prompt, analyzes dozens of sources, and delivers a comprehensive report with more citations than any other LLM. It’s the only experience with citations that links a user directly to the exact sentence it cites.
Genius Agent: Solve complex problems with a conversational prompt. Explain what you want to accomplish in natural language, and it will use Python code and chain-of-thought reasoning to solve the problem precisely.
Custom Agent: Create a Custom Agent for any task using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and more. For example, a marketing team can train the AI to follow a brand’s voice and style guide, and work collaboratively with the AI Agent without manual prompting each time. In addition, workers can easily share their Custom Agent with colleagues, ensuring consistent standards and streamlined workflows.

With this multiplayer approach, teams will be able to build, share, and discover Custom Agents, exchange chat threads, access unlimited file uploads with no data retention concerns, and more. Companies can also integrate You.com’s APIs to enhance their products with AI and information from the web.

“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,’” said Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian. “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.”

Through 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, as new and better models frequently emerge, driving demand for an all-in-one AI platform to avoid vendor lock-in. 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.

You.com offers team and enterprise site licenses starting at $25/month per seat when billed annually.

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