Why Georgian Invested in You.com

We are pleased to announce that Georgian has led You.com’s $50M Series B fundraise with participation from NVIDIA, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), Salesforce Ventures, DuckDuckGo, and Day One Ventures. This round brings You.com’s total funding to $99 million. 

You.com was founded in 2021 by Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, both former scientists at Salesforce. Richard is recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing (NLP), and for pioneering techniques like contextualized word vectors and prompt engineering with Bryan. In 2023, Time Magazine named Richard as one of the top 100 most influential people in AI.

From 2016-2021, Richard was the Chief Scientist at Salesforce, and it was in this role that he realized that large language models (LLMs) – a key theme in his academic research – could be used to build an augmented search engine experience. By harnessing LLMs, he believed that search engines could answer a user’s questions directly rather than deliver a search engine results page (SERP) full of blue links that may require more research by the user. With Seed round support from Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, Richard founded You.com with the mission to be “the leading platform for advancing human-to-AI collaboration”. You.com was one of the first companies to use AI Agents to disrupt the global search market, launching in November 2021, over a year before ChatGPT’s debut. 

You.com’s Approach to Search Helps Make Knowledge Workers More Productive 

Amid a wave of new LLMs, accuracy — or mitigating a model’s risk of “hallucinating” —  has emerged as a central theme in discussions about these models. Typically, in order to validate the accuracy of a model’s output, a user still has to navigate to a search engine, type in a query and scan several websites to assess which sites are relevant and trustworthy. This process often requires the user to scroll past several ads and irrelevant results. 

You.com aims to ensure accuracy in its results and streamline the validation process by acting as a personal AI-search assistant, providing users with a concise answer, plus a linked citation. The output resembles a research report and can help to address inaccuracy concerns without requiring additional research.

Georgian initially took notice of You.com based on the platform’s ability to include verifiable data sourcing in its output for a user. The company was early to incorporate snippets with linked citations alongside its response, often down to the exact line in the source webpage. By doing so, You.com allows a user to not only obtain an answer to a given question but also verify the accuracy of the response through a review of the cited reference points.   

You.com’s Premium Modes Support Enterprise Teams

You.com’s approach to search indexing aims to improve the quality of business users’ results. Each of You.com’s premium modes supports this objective:

• Research mode produces a comprehensive research report by executing on multiple searches from one user prompt and reviewing dozens of web sources. It is also one of the only conversational experiences in the market that cites each sentence in the output. 
• Genius mode allows users to solve more complex problems. In this mode, You.com’s AI assistant decomposes a user’s natural language prompt into components, attempts a solution and then evaluates its own solution for correctness. For example, this feature means that a user can ask a question in natural language, receive a code solution and have that code verified by You.com.  
• Finally, You.com enables users to build Custom Agents for tasks using a range of LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and more. For example, a Customer Success team can train an agent to draft a response to a customer query based on a set of guidelines. 

Ultimately, we believe that LLMs, combined with You.com’s search index, will unlock new productivity use cases for knowledge workers in the enterprise. 

Congrats to the You.com team and Co-Founders Richard Socher and Bryan McCann for the recent fundraise. We look forward to supporting the team as they build the next-generation search experience. You can learn more about the company on you.com’s website, or try searching with AI Agents on you.com.