By Bonnie Chase,Richard MacManus

Copyright thenewstack

The last time I talked to You.com CEO Richard Socher was July 2022, several months before the launch of ChatGPT changed everything. Back then, Socher, a former Stanford natural language processing (NLP) researcher and chief scientist at Salesforce, had excitedly introduced me to YouCode — a kind of mix between Google search and GitHub Copilot (itself a relatively new product in 2022). YouCode had some AI features, but it also relied heavily on surfacing Stack Overflow content.

How times have changed. The introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 ushered forth the AI era, putting Stack Overflow’s programming content in peril and making You.com’s consumer search engine seem old-fashioned in comparison to OpenAI’s new chatbot.

None of this was lost on Socher, who quickly pivoted his company to an enterprise AI business model in late 2022. I spoke to him to find out how that pivot happened and what it’s like now competing in the hectic AI market.

The Pivot to Enterprise AI

I began by asking how the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 impacted You’s roadmap — and what changed as a result?

In July 2022, “we were actually one of the only websites in the world that had an LLM connected to a search engine,” he replied, adding that one of the features of You back then was a “large language model (LLM) widget” that could do things like write an essay or write some code.

“ChatGPT launched,” he continued, “and then we said, well, you know, instead of having a traditional search engine with LLMs, which clearly didn’t allow us to have this massive breakout success in terms of marketing and really growing, we instead said: Let’s just lean all into this.”

When you visited the You.com homepage in mid-2022, you saw an inviting Google-style search box. Today, there’s not a search box in sight. Instead there is the following corporate message: “The next generation of enterprise AI search starts here,” along with call-to-action buttons to “Get Your Free API Key” and “Book a Demo.”

Essentially, the company now offers web search APIs for the enterprise. Its customers include DuckDuckGo (which is still focused on consumer search), Harvey AI, Windsurf and Databricks.

Socher describes You.com today as providing “answers to really complex questions.” Instead of serving up a list of links, the platform pulls from hundreds of sources, generates reports complete with citations and even produces graphs and data visualizations.

He offered the example of a business analyst requesting: “Benchmark the top five players as aerospace incumbents evaluate entry into the electric vertical takeoff and landing market.” To provide that answer, says Socher, You.com’s system will query 400+ sources, generate a detailed report and highlight citations inline so that users can quickly verify each fact.

A key differentiator, Socher stressed, is that You.com runs its own search infrastructure and index.

“All the other little competitors, they just serve APIs sitting on top of proxy networks on Google and taking Google search results,” he said. “We didn’t have that problem.”

That independence has become more valuable as Google has tightened restrictions on its results APIs, he contended, making it harder and more expensive for Google’s downstream providers to fetch results at scale.

Agents as the Next Layer

Of course, this is 2025, and AI agents are a mandatory part of the solution for all enterprise AI companies.

Beyond search and summarization, Socher said, You.com is indeed leaning into agents.

“Our customers have built close to 100,000 agents for their own internal processes.”
– Richard Socher, You.com CEO

“We weren’t just the first to have a research agent … we actually enabled other companies to build their own agents on our platform,” Socher said. “Our customers have built close to 100,000 agents for their own internal processes.”

These include research agents, business analytics agents that answer revenue and sales questions, financial analysis agents that parse 10-K filings and produce instant reports, and procurement and sales agents that can find sales targets and generate outreach material.

Competing in the Enterprise AI Market

So who are You.com’s rivals now? According to Socher, the main competitors are Google and companies selling search-results APIs (SERP APIs). I mentioned Perplexity, and he promptly dismissed that product as “extremely inaccurate,” citing a July 2024 Wired article critical of its results.

I noted that bridging LLMs with internal data at enterprises was a relatively fast market category to emerge post-ChatGPT. Two examples I profiled for The New Stack in early 2023 were Cohere and Vectara. So I asked if You.com competes with those types of companies now?

Socher replied that he sees them more as adjacent players. Cohere, for example, focuses on training its own LLMs, while You.com integrates with multiple LLMs and layers search infrastructure on top. He added that You.com also offers its own LLMs, via open source models that it fine-tunes.

“Nowadays, there are so many open source LLMs that it’s actually quite easy to take those and fine-tune them to your problems. And so we have both internal LLMs ourselves, and we offer a full orchestration for across all the LLMs, where you don’t even have to select which one — our AI actually chooses the best one.”

The orchestration system, called Auto Mode, was introduced at the end of May. It includes the ability to combine multiple models for complex workflows.

The Bigger Picture: Knowledge Work in Transition

Clearly, the past few years have been a time of transition for You.com. But the company has not only survived, it just raised $100 million in venture capital funding to continue building “the highways of the agentic era.”

“It’s not just the search market now that is changing. It’s really every single industry that deals with knowledge is changing,” Socher said.

“In five to 10 years, if you’re not using an agent, that means you’re doing really repetitive work yourself, which you should have delegated to AI.”

He likens the current AI moment to earlier technology shifts. “Twenty years ago, you had a few folks who were like, ‘I’m not so good with this computer thing.’ You don’t see those people anymore,” he said. “In five to 10 years, if you’re not using an agent, that means you’re doing really repetitive work yourself, which you should have delegated to AI.”

You.com is positioning itself as an infrastructure layer for enterprises as they adapt to this AI future, but its DNA as a search company remains key.

“That’s why we’re leaning into this composable API infrastructure now, where you can take search results, you can take information from the web, can take all kinds of information from company internal sources, and then you can decide to put that into your own LLM, or you can use our LLM,” said Socher. “It’s, like, fully composable as an API infrastructure layer that especially shines on the search side of things.”