Artificial intelligence startup SuSea Inc., which does business as You.com, today announced that it has raised $150 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Cox Enterprises led the Series C round. It was joined by several returning backers including Georgian, Norwest and Salesforce Ventures. You.com co-founders Bryan McCann (left) and Richard Socher (right) held senior research roles at Salesforce Inc. before launching the company in 2020.

You.com’s first product was a search engine for the consumer market. The service allowed users to scroll search results not only vertically but also horizontally. The interface included a dedicated section for finding open-source code files. 

Last September, You.com raised $50 million in funding and started refocusing on the enterprise market. Its product portfolio now comprises a collection of application programming interfaces that companies can use to build AI applications. You.com says that its APIs fetch data faster and more accurately than Google LLC’s search API for developers . 

One You.com service, the Research API, equips applications with the ability to turn data from the public web into reports. It can pull content from up to 30 sources in response to a user query. Customers may use a second You.com offering, Data API, to enrich the information their AI applications pull from the web with internal data.

For workloads that prioritize output generation speed over response length, the company offers a service called Smart API. It lends itself to tasks such as powering e-commerce chatbots. There’s also a general-purpose Web and News Search API that supports a broader range of data retrieval use cases. 

Enterprises with advanced requirements can hire You.com to build custom APIs and AI agents. According to the company, its engineers have built agents for organizations with billions of users.

You.com’s software is powered by large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and other AI providers. It also uses Meta Platform’s Llama series of open-source LLMs. When users enter a prompt, the company’s platform automatically finds the algorithm best suited to generate a response.

“Today, we process over 1 billion queries monthly with our API for companies like DuckDuckGo, Windsurf, Harvey, and others across technology, e-commerce, financial services, media, manufacturing, hospitality and more,” Socher and McCann wrote in a blog post announcing its new funding round.

Bloomberg reported that You.com will use the capital to double its headcount to about 200 employees. The company also plans to open an office in San Francisco and build new products.

Image: You.com