“I was hoping that with this we would have better answers as consumers, but Google is just so stuck… so we started You.com initially thinking it would be a consumer search engine,” Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of You.com, said on the Future Proof podcast in June. “But eventually we realized that for complex work queries where this technology can really shine, we got the most traction.”
That pivot away from consumer search now defines the company. You.com has raised $100 million in new funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, marking its entry into the unicorn ranks. The round was led by Cox Enterprises, with follow-on investment from Georgian, Salesforce Ventures, and Norwest.
A Pivot to Enterprise Productivity
Socher and co-founder Bryan McCann launched You.com in 2020 after leaving Salesforce, where they had both been senior researchers. The company’s original product was a search engine, but early experience revealed the limitations of competing head-on with Google. As Socher explained, “The vast majority of questions that users ask are things like what’s the weather tomorrow, what was the score of the game… none of those kinds of questions are where you can be 10x better than Google.”
Enterprise customers, by contrast, needed systems that could handle far more complex tasks. Today, You.com sells search APIs and AI agents that help businesses integrate large language models into workflows. The company says it processes nearly one billion queries monthly, serving customers like DuckDuckGo, Databricks, Harvey, and news organizations including Germany’s DPA and the Telegraph.
In the case of DPA, You.com’s technology helps journalists automatically pull citations from internal databases to ensure accuracy. Socher has positioned this kind of verifiable research capability as the foundation of the company’s relevance. “When you write really complex research reports and they’re 20 pages long with 300 citations… that’s where insurance companies and hedge funds, consultants, financial analysts all can rely on You.com,” he said.
Measuring Up Against OpenAI and Perplexity
The $100 million raise follows a $50 million round last year, and the company plans to use the funds to double its roughly 100-person workforce, open a San Francisco office, and expand its New York presence. Cox Enterprises is also adding David Yang of Socium Ventures to You.com’s board.
Competition in enterprise AI is intense. Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic are building overlapping offerings, and large cloud platforms continue to push their own APIs. Socher has acknowledged this dynamic but argued that You.com’s advantage lies in focus and technical transparency. “In AI there are still benchmarks, and you have to show that you’re better on these benchmarks… we published results, open sourced all the code, shared all our answers,” he said.
That emphasis on measurable accuracy has informed products like ARI, or Advanced Research and Insights, an agent capable of scanning hundreds of sources simultaneously and generating research reports with citations and visualizations. Early adopters include consulting firms and financial services companies that require documented precision in their outputs.
The strategy reflects a broader shift in the AI sector away from chasing mass-market search traffic toward specialized enterprise use cases. As Socher put it, “What’s actually more relevant are the pro arguments for enterprise, where you can essentially see users just loving our technology and appreciating that we’re more accurate than OpenAI’s Deep Research [and] other small competitors.”
Building for Durability
The funding positions You.com with greater resources at a time when capital is concentrating around a handful of winners in AI. Investors appear to be betting that the company can sustain growth by carving out defensible roles in industries that value accuracy, verifiability, and integration with private data.
Still, the path ahead involves competing with both larger, better-capitalized rivals and the rapid improvement of open-source models. Socher has framed this as an ongoing race. “We’re now the most accurate… in three to six months someone will pick up these benchmarks and spend even more resources on it, and you can’t stand still,” he said. With a valuation of $1.5 billion, a larger team, and expanded investor backing, the company is now positioned to test their bet on enterprise-grade research.
