You.com raises $100M in series C funding at $1.5B valuation to scale AI search infrastructure

You.com has raised $100 million in Series C funding, pushing the Palo Alto-based AI search and chatbot startup to a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Cox Enterprises through its new tech fund Socium Ventures, with Georgian, Salesforce Ventures, and Norwest returning as backers.

The new capital gives You.com room to grow its infrastructure and expand offerings for businesses eager to build custom AI applications. The company states that its platform combines proprietary data with live web information, with a focus on speed, accuracy, and privacy.

This raise comes just a year after You.com secured $50 million in funding while pivoting from an AI-powered consumer search engine to the AI assistant market. Since then, the platform has processed more than a billion user queries and now handles over a billion API calls each month.

Founded in 2020 by former Salesforce AI scientists Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, You.com began as a consumer-facing search engine known for its AI-generated summaries and citations. Over time, it repositioned itself as an enterprise infrastructure provider, giving developers and companies tools to integrate multiple AI models and live web data directly into their apps. The platform also offers features like zero data retention and custom orchestration of models.

“AI has entered a new age. Soon there will be more AI agents using the web than humans, but today’s search infrastructure wasn’t designed for this,” the founders said in a statement announcing the funding. “It was built for humans to click on links and get shallow responses. AI agents need deep, contextual information from both private company data and public web data to make decisions and ultimately take actions.”

The funding also brings a new board member: David Yang from Socium Ventures. Yang joins as Cox Enterprises doubles down on AI with the launch of its new tech-focused investment arm.

You.com is operating in a crowded field where giants like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and now Apple are all rolling out advanced AI assistants to millions of users. Still, the startup is positioning itself with a more flexible model, catering to both businesses and consumers. On the consumer side, it offers a premium subscription for $15 per month (when billed annually), slightly undercutting Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which all hover around $20 per month.

The company’s next step is to use its war chest to strengthen its enterprise push, scaling infrastructure, and giving organizations more control over how they use AI. For Socher and McCann, the bet is clear: if AI agents really are about to outnumber human users on the web, someone has to build the search and data infrastructure they’ll run on.