Sep 30, 2024

Founded in 2020—two years before Perplexity —You.com has been building its search tech, client base, and positioning itself as a more specialist contender in the AI search arena. Built on AI models like ChatGPT and Claude, the company wants to answer the more complex and specific queries that Google cannot, such as ‘What’s the extended background of the Peloponnesian War?’ In September, You.com raised $50 million in a Series B funding round, doubling its revenue this year with over 500% growth each quarter, according to founder and CEO, Richard Socher. Last week, it inked a deal with German health media firm Wort & Bild Verlag. Socher is also an investor at AIX Ventures, which backed Perplexity for its $25.6 million Series A funding last year. Bryan McCann (left) and Richard Socher (right) launched You.com in 2020. You.com You.com operates two business models: a subscription service called Pro ($20 per month) and an API arm. As a multimodal platform, You.com handles complex queries by analyzing the question, scouring the open web, and reviewing multiple sources for relevant information. Citations are linked directly from the answers. Users can also create custom assistance workflows—or agents —to help with tasks like SEO optimization, such as writing articles designed to rank highly on Google. Socher, who previously held the position of chief scientist and evp at Salesforce, discusses how his startup differentiates as the era of AI-powered search intensifies. Answers are edited for brevity and clarity. You founded the company in 2020 and have been in the market longer than similar platforms, like Perplexity. How is You.com different from Perplexity? We are not competing with Google to try and help you answer, ‘How old is Obama?’ or ‘What’s the weather tomorrow?’  Those are all queries that are fine on Google. You can still replace Google with You.com but we see the most differentiation when it comes to the knowledge worker queries … marketers, account executives, biotech, media and publishers who care about accuracy and citations and not hallucinations. We [are focused] on making the technology more trustworthy. We’re now focusing more on users that benefit most from the new accuracy and reasoning capability of these models by working with knowledge workers. You.com The Perplexity and You.com interface even look similar. How are you proving your value and uniqueness to customers? People copy our features all the time. Big companies do it. Small companies do it. In some cases, they just add random links behind random sentences, and it looks the same to an untrained eye. But to people and the companies that actually care about accuracy, after they compare us, they end up partnering with us. In this space, you have to move quickly. We help companies that are struggling with the fast-moving space that is gen AI, make them future-proof by having all the latest language models (LLMs) available within You.com. We also do workshops with those companies to help them understand all the use cases. And that’s what’s resonating more with enterprise customers. We’re not trying to chase Google the way some competition is. ADWEEK has contacted Perplexity and will update if it responds. Is there enough of a market for similar products? It’s such a massive market that will change every industry out there. Every company, over the next few years, will run into an innovative dilemma at some point, because the way they’ve done business is going to massively change because of AI. We have millions of users, and we have our customers—who themselves have hundreds of millions of users—and they send us millions of queries a day. The volume of queries we get through our customers is larger than the volume of queries that we get on our own platform. Will you serve ads? We may experiment with it at some point but it’s not a big focus for us now. We focus on enterprise knowledge workers who really want their answers to be accurate. And they [are] moving away from Google because there’s so many ads on Google. How are you working with publishers? We help publishers in two ways—with both our lines of business subscriptions—where every employee inside a publisher has access to all the latest LLM models. And then we infuse those answers over their custom data sets and custom search back ends for their own web properties. Imagine you’re a publisher and you have your own website. Now you can answer questions on your own website, over your own content, with our API to get those answers with correct citations. What about signing deals with publishers to use their content? We’d be happy to work with publishers on that as well. There are indeed a few folks who steal publishers’ content and then do their own SEO with almost verbatim content. That’s pretty unsustainable and illegal and not ethical, for sure. We’re not doing that.