Fmr Chief Scientist at Salesforce, Richard Socher | You.com
$99M Raised, LLMs, AI Agents, Complex Work
SO excited to share this conversation!
Today we have Richard Socher, previously Chief Scientist at Salesforce and a leading figure in AI. Richard is Founder & CEO of You.com & co-founder and Managing Director at AIX Ventures. You.com is pioneering knowledge work with an AI-driven productivity engine and recently raised a $50M Series B led by Georgian with participation from Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, Gen Digital, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), DuckDuckGo, and Day One Ventures, bringing You.com’s total funding to $99M.
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Previously, Richard founded MetaMind, which successfully exited to Salesforce and then served as Chief Scientist at Salesforce. Richard was an adjunct professor at Stanford and earned recognition as one of the top five most cited researchers in natural language processing worldwide. With AIX Ventures has invested in over 30 AI startups like Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, Wispr, and more.
In this conversation we unveil how You.com has evolved from search engine to 'productivity engine,' processing millions of queries daily for millions of customers through a unique combination of accurate search and LLM orchestration.
The company's contrarian bet on accuracy over marketing hype is paying off, attracting hedge funds, biotech firms, and Fortune 500 companies who need trustworthy AI. Unlike competitors who often fake citations, You.com's approach enables users to verify sources down to the exact paragraph—a critical feature when careers and million-dollar decisions hang in the balance.
Richard shares a compelling vision of the future where AI Agents outnumber human web users, and knowledge workers become AI managers rather than task executioners. But he tempers the hype with pragmatic insights about AI's current limitations, arguing that while simple chatbots can help with weather forecasts, the real revolution lies in automating complex knowledge work.
Plus, we can’t help but get into analyzing the AI valuation bubble, a comparison between Meta & OpenAI, and some of Richard’s investment strategies.
With their recent $50M Series B led by Georgian, You.com is scaling this vision of AI-augmented productivity, while pioneering features like multiplayer modes for team collaboration and custom AI agents.
Highlights
(02:35) Discussion of You.com's $50M Series B funding round
(14:16) Ensuring accuracy and reliability of information
(19:04) Technical infrastructure and search stack
(25:18) Introduction of multiplayer features
(27:37) Evolution of AI agents on the platform
(31:16) Customer profiles and use cases
(34:58) The decreasing marginal cost of intelligence
(38:16) Future of AI automation and workforce
(41:11) Richard's background and career journey
(46:00) Perspective on AI agents as an Investor and Founder
(49:01) AI investment landscape and opportunities
(51:31) Current AI funding market dynamics
(52:57) AIX Ventures investment strategy
Resources
You.com raises $50M Series B [You.com]
You.com raises $50 million to make knowledge workers more productive [You.com]
You.com is your AI-powered productivity engine [Cerebral Valley]
With $50M in new funding, You.com thinks its AI can beat Google on hard questions [TechCrunch]
You.com founder talks the future of AI: Opening Bid [Yahoo Finance]
Amazing Answers: Richard Socher on how You.com is Reimagining Search with AI [Cognitive Revolution]
Richard Socher On The Future Of Trust In LLMs [Snowflake Developers]
Richard Socher | You.com | How AI is Changing the World [Scale AI]