SuSea reportedly raising $50 million in fresh capital

The startup is reportedly raising $50 million as it seeks a foothold in the AI assistant market

The startup behind You.com is reportedly raising $50 million in fresh capital as it seeks a foothold in the growing market for assistants with AI.

The near-finished Series B funding would value the four-year-old firm behind You.com, SuSea Inc, at $700 million to $900 million, a person familiar with the effort told Reuters. Users have queried You.com 1 billion times since its launch, the person added.

After ChatGPT ignited interest in You.com’s AI-infused search engine in early 2023, some of its users began looking elsewhere. Microsoft refreshed its Bing search engine with an AI chatbot of its own, while Alphabet’s Google added AI-generated answers for more nuanced queries.

You.com’s 11 million visitors in May reflected a year-to-date (YTD) increase in web traffic, but the number was still below its 20 million high in February 2023, as per Similarweb data. Its app downloads have dropped an estimated 69% so far in 2024, versus the same period in 2023, said Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. Other AI startups have faced similar headwinds.

Against this backdrop, the California-based firm has morphed You.com into an AI assistant, one that is focused on productivity as well as internet search, according to its website.

Richard Socher, CEO and former Salesforce chief scientist, told Reuters earlier this year that You.com could craft prose or computer code, as well as navigate a sea of technologies to determine the right answer to a user’s query.

The market for powerful AI assistants is nascent and crowded. Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, and now Apple are among the big names pushing new agent-like capabilities for their many millions of users.

You.com charges $15 per month for its premium consumer subscription when billed annually, giving access to top artificial intelligence models from across industry plus other productivity tools. Alternative subscriptions from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI cost nearly $20 monthly.