You.com Reportedly Raising $50 Million for AI Assistants

You.com’s parent company is reportedly raising $50 million to tap the AI assistant market.

This Series B round would value SuSea, the company behind the You.com search engine, at between $700 million and $900 million, Reuters reported Monday (June 17), citing a source familiar with the matter.

As that report notes, You.com has an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine, one that has lost ground as Google and Bing incorporated AI into their own search functions.

The site had 11 million visitors in May, down from its peak of 20 million in February of last year, Reuters said, citing data from Similarweb. The company’s app downloads are down as well, dropping 69% this year so far.

This shift has led the SuSea to turn You.com into an AI assistant that focuses on both web searches and productivity, the report said.

Reuters source said the company’s sales are on the rise, with its annual recurring revenue — from both consumer and business-to-business subscriptions — growing five times since January.

PYMNTS took a closer look at the rise of AI-powered assistants earlier this year after Anthropic introduced a new capability that lets businesses develop custom AI helpers to better manage customer support inquiries and optimize operational processes.

The evolution of Anthropic’s Claude “from a chatbot to a sophisticated assistant“ is a sign of rapid advancements in the field, Dmytro Shevchenko, a data scientist from Aimprosoft, said in an interview with PYMNTS.

“Claude has evolved from a chatbot that answers questions based on its experience or data provided using RAG to a tool that mimics a real assistant,” he added. “It can handle specific tasks such as canceling orders, accessing database information, providing current weather updates, and more. Essentially, Claude will know anything that can be requested through the API.”

AI assistants’ potential uses are vast, from email management and product recommendations to virtual shopping assistants and more. As businesses increasingly seek ways to automate processes and provide more efficient customer service, custom AI assistants could become an invaluable tool.

Julia McCoy, AI president of Content at Scale, told PYMNTS she foresees a future where businesses integrating Tool Use from Claude into their systems will “streamline their customer success into a faster, better experience. Too many times, humans take too long to simply look up order data — AI can solve that problem 10x faster because it’s AI and functions without humanity’s problems. I think businesses that lean into AI agent functionality and autonomous support departments will win big time in efficiency and profitability.”