You.com, one of the main rivals of Perplexity, has announced that it has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Georgian, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia, Gen Digital, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), DuckDuckGo, Day One Ventures, and others. Added to previous funding, You.com has total funding of $99 million, it said.
For those who have never used You.com, it allows you to ask queries, and then it goes online to research its answer. It then uses a large language model to formulate an answer. It"s very similar to Perplexity and ChatGPT Search but also includes Agents to refine the answer you get, and you can select different models to answer you.
According to Richard Socher, CEO of You.com, the Series B funding will help the company to "continue building the most trusted AI productivity engine and expand into the enterprise."
The shift into enterprise is an extremely common trend. Just today, Anthropic launched an Enterprise plan for Claude and Inflection, last month, announced plans to cap its bot for personal users and focus on an enterprise offering instead.
You.com, while a competitor to Perplexity, is not as popular. Last month, Neowin reported that Perplexity saw 250 million queries a month, which works out to around 3 billion queries a year. You.com, on the other hand, reported that it has served 1 billion queries since it launched in 2021 (it only added an LLM in December 2022).
Ultimately, this funding news is a great development for ordinary users. It means that You.com gets to continue operations and compete in the marketplace. With added competition, companies are more likely to offer free services to end users to attract market share.
Have you ever tried You.com? How did you find it? Was it more accurate than Perplexity and Google"s Gemini? Let us know in the comments.