You, a startup challenging Google LLC in the search engine market, today disclosed that it has closed a $25 million funding round led by Radical Ventures.

A number of other investors participated as well. Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Day One Ventures and Time Ventures, an investment fund operated by Salesforce.com Inc. founder Marc Benioff, contributed to You’s latest funding round.

You, officially SuSea Inc., provide a search engine that it positions as an alternative to Google and to Microsoft Corp.’s Bing. The startup’s search engine includes several features that are not offered by its larger rivals.

You organizes the web pages that appear in a search results page into rows. Each row contains pages from a specific website. Looking up a programming term, for example, might bring up a row that contains Wikipedia articles explaining the term and a second row with related software projects from GitHub.

You makes it possible to scroll a search results page not only vertically but also horizontally. A user can select a specific row of content in a search results page, for example a row that contains Wikipedia articles about a programming term, and expand it to bring up related content from Wikipedia. It’s 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’s an interface section optimized specifically to help developers find technical resources, such open-source code snippets that they can incorporate into their software. A second section is geared toward searching food delivery apps for nearby delivery options.

In some cases, You can not only retrieve content from the web but also generate new content. The startup’s search engine includes an artificial intelligence tool that is capable of generating software code in response to natural language prompts. 

Since launching in 2020, You has built up an installed base of several hundred thousand users. The startup told TechCrunch that signups to its search engine jumped 70% in June. Users are running 30% more unique searches than they did last month and 50% of users who set the platform as their default search continue to use it afterwards, according to the startup.  

With its new $25 million funding round, You intends to deliver yet more specialized features for users. The startup will build some of those features in-house. Additionally, it plans to enable third-party developers to build custom applications on its search engine.

You is the latest in a series of search startups to have raised funding over the last few months. Most of the other startups on the list offer products for the enterprise market. 

AlphaSense Inc. raised $225 million last month for its namesake search platform, which enables financial professionals to find information about stocks and market trends quickly. Companies also use the platform for tasks such as researching competitors’ business growth initiatives. Earlier, Barcelona-based startup Nuclia raised $5.4 million to develop tools that help software teams build custom search engines with AI features.

Image: You