The world needs a better search engine. That is the fundamental thesis behind the Radical Ventures lead investment in You.com’s Series A, announced last week. In a David vs Goliath battle, we are placing our bet on the upstart led by an extraordinary team leveraging technology that makes it possible to compete with one of the tech world’s most entrenched incumbents.
You.com was founded by Richard Socher, former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and one of the world’s most cited researchers in natural language processing (NLP), and Bryan McCann, who led research and NLP teams at Salesforce.
They have built a customizable search platform that integrates both the web results of a standard search engine as well as embedded applications offering richer experiences from over 150 sources such as Reddit, Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Arxiv, across different categories including coding, shopping, recipes, and web3.
Why do we need a new search engine? There is a growing dissatisfaction and lack of trust in mainstream search, which is dependent on ad revenue. Users feel search results are flooded with paid content, and are tired of having their intent monetized. These intrusive ads also rely on tracking cookies that target customers for behavioural information.
With You.com, users have control. They control the powerful AI behind the platform by personalizing and customizing sources they want to see, the order of the results, and the amount of information they want to share about their searches and web activity. You.com has also built apps into the platform that enable users to explicitly employ AI to perform an action within the search results: YouWrite (AI-powered text generation for students and copywriters) and Code Complete (AI-powered code generation tool for developers).
You.com recently launched YouCode, the first open search platform for developers. You.com’s unique growth strategy – offering search products like YouCode tailored to different audiences built by extending the platform – has allowed the company to grow a user base in 6 months that alternative search engines took years to achieve. YouCode is just one example of how user-centric search can be a productivity force multiplier in people’s daily workflows. The company’s use of AI to get things done for its users has the potential to completely shift what it means to be an Internet search engine today.
Our team at Radical Ventures has significant prior experience building search products and has had a front-row seat to the latest advances in NLP over the past few years. The capabilities of advanced language models are now able to outperform rules-based systems in many domains. For search in particular, this means a more nuanced understanding of a user’s intent, more personalized results, and a fundamentally better search experience. We had been looking for a team to partner with in the search category for a few years, and are excited to partner with Richard and Bryan as they bring much-needed innovation to the field of search by giving users control of their online experience.
As Dan Primack wrote in Axios Pro Rata last week: ”You.com is a highest degree of difficulty startup with vast reward potential. Or, as Google might put it, a moonshot.”
