Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Bing (NASDAQ: MSFT) and every other search engine have a new member, which is YOU. Launched in 2020, the search engine startup, last week, raised $25M funding led by Radical Ventures. The funding received participation from Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Day One Ventures, and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) investment fund Time Ventures. To connect the dots, You.com was developed by former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher.
SuSea Inc.’s YOU is positioned as an alternative to Google and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing. Larger competitors do not offer many search features that the startup’s engine does. YOU use rows to arrange the web pages that appear on a search results page. Each row represents an individual website. It’s possible to look up a programming phrase on Wikipedia and get Wikipedia articles about the term and related GitHub projects.
Vertical and horizontal scrolling of a search results page is now possible thanks to YOU. Search results pages allow users to expand individual rows of content, such as those containing Wikipedia articles about programming terms, to bring up additional Wikipedia content. Scrolling down, as with other search engines, will bring up new information sources.
Its rivals do not provide access to various specific capabilities through the YOU search engine interface. Developers looking for technical materials, such as open-source code snippets that they may include in their applications, will find this section optimized. A second part is devoted to finding nearby food delivery applications.
YOU can create fresh content in addition to retrieving it from the web in some circumstances. The startup’s search engine incorporates an artificial intelligence tool that can generate software code to answer natural language questions. Apparently, the search engine doesn’t serve any ads.
More than a hundred thousand people have used the YOU search engine. Signups for the search engine increased by 70% in June, the startup told TechCrunch. Since last month, 30% more unique searches have been conducted by users and 50% of those who chose the platform as their default search continue to do so.
After receiving a $25M investment round, YOU plans to customize its service for its subscribers further. Some of these features will be developed in-house by the startup. It also intends to open to third-party developers so they can create their unique applications.
YOU is the latest startup to secure venture capital funding in the last several months of other enterprise product firms raising funds. The AlphaSense Inc. search tool, which enables financial professionals to access information on stocks and market patterns swiftly, raised $225M in funding last month. Businesses also use the platform to keep tabs on their competitors’ company expansion plans. Earlier this year, Barcelona-based Nuclia secured $5.4M to develop AI-powered search engine tools for software development teams.
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