AI-Powered Productivity Engine Secures $50M in Series B funding

Collaborative AI-powered productivity engine You.com has successfully secured $50M in a Series B funding round, spearheaded by growth-stage B2B investor Georgian.

Noteworthy contributors to this round include Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, Gen Digital, SBVA, DuckDuckGo, and Day One Ventures.

You.com’s innovative platform features advanced proprietary AI agents tailored for precise research and problem-solving, benchmarked externally for accuracy. Crucially, it offers users the capability to develop custom AI agents compatible with any AI model for diverse tasks.

The platform currently hosts millions of active users, ranging from hedge funds and tech unicorns to multiple publicly traded companies, and boasts handling over 1 billion queries since its inception in 2021, the company reports.

This significant funding announcement accompanies major enhancements, such as a newly introduced multiplayer AI in the Team plan that transcends solitary work modes, fostering a collaborative and team-focused environment.

According to the company, this multiplayer feature allows teams to build, share, and discover Custom Agents, exchange chat threads, and access unlimited file uploads without data retention concerns.

Additionally, the product offers AI research agents capable of conducting multiple searches from a single prompt, an AI genius agent designed to solve intricate problems through conversational prompts, and a custom AI agent adaptable to any task using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.

Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian, shared that her team leveraged You.com for extensive market research and synthesis tasks, achieving substantial time savings.

“We are confident that You.com’s deep reservoir of talent and technological prowess will ensure the company’s continued leadership in a rapidly changing market,” Wu commented.

You.com was co-founded by Salesforce alumni Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, who served as chief scientist and lead AI research scientist respectively. The duo’s pioneering work at Salesforce in 2017 includes the development of contextualized word vectors, bringing significant advancements in search technology.

Reflecting on the journey, Socher remarked, “We envisioned reinventing the online journey’s gateway, moving beyond traditional blue links to provide more insightful answers.”

He highlighted that their AI agents enhance productivity for millions of knowledge workers through quick, accurate answers, comprehensive research and analysis, effective problem-solving, and content generation.

Socher and McCann were among the earliest to incorporate large language models (LLMs) into search experiences prior to ChatGPT, offering up-to-date answers with verifiable citations.

While at Salesforce, the pair also pioneered prompt engineering with a 2018 DecaNLP paper, establishing a legacy of innovation in AI and search technologies.