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

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup You.com has reportedly raised $100 million in new funding.

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.”

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