TORONTO — You.com, a startup that makes artificial intelligence “agents” that workers use to do multi-step tasks, has secured US$50 million in financing led by Georgian, the Toronto-headquartered venture firm. 

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is part of a growing category of AI assistants. For example, a developer working for a You.com client could use one of its agents to debug software code, while a financial analyst employs another to produce research reports, and a salesperson a third to identify potential customers. 

Founded in 2020, You.com started in another hot area of AI, launching a search engine in a bid to take on Google. The startup was an early adopter of large language models (LLMs), providing users with summarized answers instead of just links; Google and new, venture-backed entrants like OpenAI and Perplexity now offer similar formats.  

In interviews in June and August, You.com CEO Richard Socher said the firm discovered it could not significantly outperform existing sites on simple factual queries like “How old is Barack Obama?” But it started to rack up subscriptions from workers with “more complex questions that aren’t quite as easy to solve as one Google search,” he said.  

So You.com has shifted its focus to agents, and to business customers looking to save their employees’ time. Clients can use the software to build their own agents, and choose among LLMs from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google and Toronto’s Cohere to generate the results.

The startup touts the accuracy of the results generated by its system. “When it really matters for companies and their employees to be productive, but also correct, they start to switch to us,” Socher said.  

You.com caught Georgian’s attention because its responses to users include citations and verifiable sources, lead investor Margaret Wu wrote in a blog post to be published Wednesday. “We believe that LLMs, combined with You.com’s search index, will unlock new productivity use cases for knowledge workers in the enterprise.”

Other investors in the all-equity, Series B round included chip giant Nvidia, SoftBank spinoff SBVA and search engine DuckDuckGo. Georgian is the second major Canadian AI investor to lead a You.com round—Toronto’s Radical Ventures headed up a US$25-million Series A in July 2022.   

German-born Socher said the startup’s international investors have brought a grounded approach to technology financing. “I think the Canadians are a little bit more understated and less hype-y,” he said.  

You.com will use the new funding to develop its technology and sales strategy. It will also recruit more staff, although Socher declined to disclose the current size of the firm’s workforce. The company currently has some employees in Canada, and could make more hires here, he said. 

You.com has raised US$99 million so far, less than some other agent startups. The firm was “very careful and methodical in our fundraise,” said Socher, who claimed You.com’s revenue is increasing rapidly. “Unlike a lot of others that are just incinerating cash, we’re trying to be smart about how we grow.”