You, a startup challenging Google LLC in the search engine market, today revealed that it has closed a $25 million funding round led by Radical Ventures.
A number of other investors also participated. Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Day One Ventures and Time Ventures, an investment fund managed by Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com Inc., contributed to You’s latest funding round.
You, officially SuSea Inc., provide a search engine that it positions as an alternative to Google and Microsoft Corp’s Bing. The startup’s search engine includes several features not offered by its larger rivals.
You organize the web pages that appear in a search results page into rows. Each row contains pages from a specific website. Searching for a programming term, for example, might bring up a line with Wikipedia articles explaining the term and a second line with related software projects from GitHub.
Allows you to scroll a page of search results not only vertically but also horizontally. A user can select a specific row of content from a search results page, such as a row containing Wikipedia articles on a programming term, and expand it to display related Wikipedia content. It is also possible to scroll down like in other search engines to bring up content from additional sources.
You’s interface offers access to a number of specialized features not provided by its rivals. There is an interface section optimized specifically to help developers find technical resources, such as snippets of open source code that they can incorporate into their software. A second section is geared towards finding food delivery apps for nearby delivery options.
In some cases, you can not only grab content from the web, but also generate new content. The startup’s search engine includes an artificial intelligence tool capable of generating software code in response to natural language prompts.
Since its launch in 2020, You has built up an installed base of several hundred thousand users. The startup told Tech Crunch that registrations for its search engine jumped 70% in June. Users are performing 30% more unique searches compared to last month, and 50% of users who set the platform as their default search continue to use it afterward, according to the startup.
With its new $25 million funding round, You intends to bring even more specialized features to users. The startup will build some of these features in-house. Additionally, it plans to allow third-party developers to create custom apps on its search engine.
You is the latest in a string of search startups to raise funds in recent months. Most of the other startups on the list offer products aimed at the enterprise market.
AlphaSense Inc. raised $225 million last month for its namesake research platform, which enables financial professionals to quickly find information on stocks and market trends. Businesses also use the platform for tasks such as researching competitors’ business growth initiatives. Previously, the Barcelona startup Nuclia raised $5.4 million to develop tools that help software teams build custom search engines with AI capabilities.
