$50m for Knowledge Worker AI Firm You.com

AI-powered 'productivity engine' You.com, which promises to make knowledge workers more productive, has announced a $50 million Series B funding round.

The company's suite of APIs and end-to-end solutions, described as 'collaborative AI', promise benefits including fast and accurate research and analysis as well as complex problem solving. You.com was founded by AI pioneers and former Salesforce lead scientists Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, and has now raised around $99m in funds. The current round was led by growth-stage B2B investor Georgian Partners, who have headed funding for a number of data and insights firms including OpenWeb, Tealium, Bluecore, Chorus.AI and - long ago when Georgian was new and Alida was not yet a thing - Vision Critical. The latest You.com round was joined by others including Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, Gen Digital, SBVA, Georgian Ventures, Radical Ventures, Day One Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Untapped Ventures and search engine DuckDuckGo.

Socher says the company's AI agents 'help millions of knowledge workers be more productive, whether it's through fast, accurate answers, research and analysis, problem-solving, or content creation'. You.com aims to solve the accuracy problem which it says it the main barrier to AI adoption in the workplace [yes we can see why that would be a problem... - Ed.]. He comments: 'It's easy to make a quick prototype with an LLM. It's difficult to make them accurate at scale. Our focus at You.com has been making LLMs more trustworthy. In December 2022, we were the first consumer-facing LLM with internet access, providing up-to-date answers with verifiable citations. Since then, we've built an entire AI operating system that's model agnostic to provide the most comprehensive and accurate responses'.

You.com says its solutions include three proprietary AI agents:

• 'Research Agent: In minutes, the agent executes multiple searches from one prompt, analyzes dozens of sources, and delivers a comprehensive report with more citations than any other LLM. It's the only experience with citations that links a user directly to the exact sentence it cites.
• Genius Agent: Solve complex problems with a conversational prompt. Explain what you want to accomplish in natural language, and it will use Python code and chain-of-thought reasoning to solve the problem precisely.
• Custom Agent: Create a Custom Agent for any task using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and more. For example, a marketing team can train the AI to follow a brand's voice and style guide, and work collaboratively with the AI Agent without manual prompting each time. In addition, workers can easily share their Custom Agent with colleagues, ensuring consistent standards and streamlined workflows.'

Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian says her company saves times by using You.com for the 'extensive market research and synthesis work' it does every day, and was 'particularly impressed by the agentic capabilities of 'Research Agent''.

Web site: www.you.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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