You.com


You.com is an artificial intelligence search startup that has pivoted away from consumer search engine operations toward business-focused AI tools and APIs.
The company was founded in 2020 by Richard Socher, the former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and a prominent Natural Language Processing researcher with over 220,000 citations, and Bryan McCann, a former Lead Research Scientist in NLP at Salesforce.

History

Following its 2020 founding, You.com opened its public beta on November 9, 2021, and received $20 million in funding led by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Other investors include Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, and Day One Ventures.
The domain You.com was initially purchased in 1996 by Benioff. Benioff invested in You.com and transferred ownership of the You.com domain name to the company.
In July 2022, You.com announced its $25 million Series A funding round led by Radical Ventures with participation from Time Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Day One Ventures.
In September 2024, You.com raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Georgian.
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.

Business Model

You.com generates revenue primarily through enterprise sales of search APIs and AI tools. The platform provides web search capabilities that can be integrated into enterprise applications and AI agents.

Features

On December 23, 2022, You.com was the first search engine to launch an LLM chatbot with live web results alongside its responses. Initially known as YouChat, the chatbot was primarily based on the GPT-3.5 large language model and could answer questions, suggest ideas, translate text, summarize articles, compose emails, and write code snippets, while staying up-to-date with current events and citing sources. Several further versions of YouChat were released. The second version, called YouChat 2.0, was released on February 7, 2023, incorporated improved conversational AI and community-built applications by blending a large language model named C-A-L. This update enabled YouChat to provide results in various formats, such as charts, photos, 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, combined chat functionality with results from Reddit, TikTok, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia.

YouPro

On June 21, 2023, You.com introduced YouPro, a paid subscription. Both free and paid versions provide access to large language models connected to the internet with citation capabilities.

ARI

In February 2025, You.com launched ARI, a deep research agent that scans over 400 sources simultaneously to produce research reports with verified citations and interactive graphs, charts, and visualizations. The platform targets regulated industries where comprehensive source verification is critical, with customers including healthcare publishers and advisory firms.

Reception

You.com was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2022.
You.com's ARI feature was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025.