AI-powered search engine You.com received $20 million investment

The funding, led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with support from Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, Day One Ventures, and others, will be put towards user growth, product, and technology as You.com ventures towards inexperienced users on the public web.

You.com’s stance is that the internet is becoming too centralised and controlled by powerful, ill-intentioned tech corporations. It’s cofounder and CEO, Richard Socher, states that You.com uses technology to help people “live better and more productive lives.”

Speaking to VentureBeat, Socher said: “Today, there’s too much information, and no one has time to read it, process it, or know what to trust. A single gatekeeper controls most of the search market, dictating what you see: too many advertisements and a flood of search-engine-optimised pages. On top of that, 65% of search queries end without a click on another site, which means traffic stays within the Google ecosystem.”

You.com, founded in 2020 by Socher and Bryan McCann, uses natural language processing (NLP), a form of AI, to take search queries, rank the results, and semantically parse the queries into different languages, including programming languages. The engine summarises results from across the web and is extensible with built-in search apps so that users can complete tasks without leaving the results page.

“The first page of Google can only be modified by paying for advertisements, which is both annoying to users and costly for companies. Our new platform will enable companies to contribute their most useful actual content to that first page, and — if users like it — they can take an action right then and there,” Socher continued. “Most companies and partners will prefer this new interface to people’s digital lives over the old status quo of Google.”