You.com
Search engine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You.com is an artificial intelligence search startup that has pivoted away from consumer search engine operations toward business-focused AI tools and APIs.[1][2]
Bryan McCann
Type of site | Enterprise and Search AI |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Founder(s) | Richard Socher Bryan McCann |
| URL | you |
| Launched | November 9, 2021 |
| Current status | Live |
The company was founded in 2020 by Richard Socher,[3][4] the former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and a prominent Natural Language Processing researcher with over 220,000 citations,[5] and Bryan McCann,[6][7] a former Lead Research Scientist in NLP at Salesforce.
History
Following its 2020 founding, You.com opened its public beta on November 9, 2021,[8] and received $20 million in funding led by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff.[6][9] Other investors include Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, and Day One Ventures.[10]
The domain You.com was initially purchased in 1996 by Benioff.[11] Benioff invested in You.com and transferred ownership of the You.com domain name to the company.[10]
In July 2022, You.com announced its $25 million Series A funding round led by Radical Ventures[12] with participation from Time Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Day One Ventures.[13]
In September 2024, You.com raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Georgian.[14]
In September 2025, You.com raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Cox Enterprises at a $1.5 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status.[1]
Business Model
Features
On December 23, 2022, You.com was the first search engine to launch an LLM chatbot with live web results alongside its responses.[17][18][19] Initially known as YouChat,[20] the chatbot was primarily based on the GPT-3.5 large language model and could answer questions, suggest ideas,[21] translate text,[22] summarize articles, compose emails, and write code snippets, while staying up-to-date with current events [19] and citing sources. Several further versions of YouChat were released. The second version, called YouChat 2.0, was released on February 7, 2023,[23][24] incorporated improved conversational AI[25] and community-built applications by blending a large language model named C-A-L (Chat, Apps, and Links).[25][20] This update enabled YouChat to provide results in various formats, such as charts,[26] photos,[27] videos, tables, graphs, text or code, so users can find answers without leaving the search results page. YouChat 3.0, unveiled on May 4, 2023,[28] combined chat functionality with results from Reddit, TikTok, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia.
YouPro
On June 21, 2023, You.com introduced YouPro, a paid subscription.[29] Both free and paid versions provide access to large language models connected to the internet with citation capabilities.[30]
ARI
In February 2025, You.com launched ARI (Advanced Research and Insights), a deep research agent that scans over 400 sources simultaneously to produce research reports with verified citations and interactive graphs, charts, and visualizations.[31] The platform targets regulated industries where comprehensive source verification is critical, with customers including healthcare publishers and advisory firms.[32]