An early pioneer in AI-powered search for consumers, You.com has morphed into an AI productivity engine for enterprises. The Palo Alto-based scale-up’s AI Agents maximize the productivity of workers through fast and accurate research and analysis, complex problem solving and content creation and its suite of APIs and end-to-end solutions drive revenue for businesses by becoming the foundation AI agent layer for their products and services.
TIME Magazine recognized You.com as a Best Invention in 2022, the World Economic Forum designated the company as a Technology Pioneer in 2024, and in 2025 it became a unicorn, with a valuation over $1 billion.
Co-founded in 2020 by Richard Socher, formerly Chief Scientist and Executive Vice President at Salesforce, and Bryan McCann, formerly a Lead Research Scientist at Salesforce Research, You.com has benefited from both founders’ deep expertise in natural language processing. Socher earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014, where his dissertation on recursive deep learning for natural language processing and computer vision earned Stanford’s Best Computer Science PhD Thesis Award. His research fundamentally shaped how neural networks process language, introducing concepts that became foundational to modern AI.
In late 2025 plans were leaked about Socher’s parallel venture: Recursive AI, a research lab focused on building self-improving superintelligent systems. With discussions underway for funding at a $4 billion valuation, this initiative represents one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary AI research.
Socher tells The Innovator that self-improving superintelligence will enable the automation of knowledge discovery. “Imagine if we can do that. We would be able to innovate physics, fusion, chemistry, and unlock the ability for humans to live longer, be more productive and introduce a state of abundance,” says Socher. He says he figures it will take anywhere from one to three years to get to the first version of such a system.
The Innovator caught up with Socher at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany January 15 to 17, to talk about You.com, his new venture, and how they intersect.
Laying The Foundations
You.com, in its current form, addresses a critical enterprise need: combining internal knowledge with real-time external information while maintaining verifiable accuracy. It offers:
*AI Search and Chat: A conversational interface that combines multiple language models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, and others) with proprietary search infrastructure to deliver cited, verifiable answers. Users can select from different models based on their specific needs.
*Custom AI Agents: Organizations can build specialized agents tailored to specific workflows, trained on internal style guides, documents, and processes. According to the company, customers have created nearly 100,000 such agents for internal use cases ranging from marketing content generation to legal analysis.
*Advanced Research & Insights: A deep research agent that analyzes 400+ sources simultaneously using chain-of-thought reasoning to produce professional-grade research reports with verified citations in under five minutes. ARI represents You.com’s most advanced product for knowledge workers.
*Enterprise APIs: LLM-first APIs for Web Search, Live News, Image Search, and Private RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) that enable developers to build accurate, citation-ready AI applications without constructing their own search or data pipelines.
The Silicon Valley scale-up has several competitive advantages. Unlike competitors relying entirely on third-party search, You.com built its own search infrastructure. When the large language model (LLM) wave accelerated, this enabled rapid integration of real-time data with AI models. “It is important to give an AI a search infrastructure to provide it with the right information at the right moment,” Socher says. Rather than betting on a single foundation model, You.com provides access to 40+ LLMs, allowing organizations to route queries to the most appropriate model for each task. Every response from You.com includes citations linking back to source material, enabling verification and transparency. And, the platform securely integrates proprietary databases and documents, making internal knowledge LLM-ready while maintaining strict data controls. This addresses a critical enterprise requirement that consumer AI tools can’t.
What’s Next?
While continuing to lead You.com, Socher is currently seeking to raise hundreds of millions for Recursive AI, the research lab dedicated to building self-improving superintelligent systems. The venture is entering funding discussions at a $4 billion pre-money valuation, according to press reports.
Recursive AI will face heavy competition from well-funded incumbents and emerging challengers in the race towards super intelligence. These include:
*OpenAI: Raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation in March 2025, later reaching $500 billion through secondary sales. Projects annual recurring revenue growing from $6 billion to $20 billion by 2026.
*Anthropic: Pursues safety-focused AGI development with substantial backing from Google and Amazon. Known for Claude, a leading AI assistant emphasizing reliability and harm reduction.
*Google DeepMind: Combines Google’s resources with DeepMind’s research prowess, working on everything from AlphaGo successors to Gemini language models.
*Safe Superintelligence (SSI): Founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, focuses exclusively on building safe superintelligence without product distractions.
Recursive AI’s model differs from competitors in important ways and has several key advantages. OpenAI, despite its recent research focus, faces pressure to deliver commercial returns commensurate with its valuation. Anthropic, while committed to safety research, must balance research purity against competitive pressures. Pure research labs like SSI don’t have commercial anchors.
While Socher founded and leads both companies, You.com and Recursive AI are separate, independent entities. You.com is an enterprise AI research AI search infrastructure company. Recursive AI is a research lab dedicated to advancing superintelligence. Both reflect Socher’s belief that AI development requires parallel tracks: immediate commercial applications and fundamental breakthroughs.
As enterprise moves from experimentation to production deployment, demand for enterprise-grade AI infrastructure like You.com’s is likely to accelerate, say industry observers. The shift from passive AI assistants to autonomous agents executing complex workflows plays to You.com’s strengths in accuracy, real-time data, and enterprise integration. Increasing regulation of AI (like the EU AI Act effective 2026) may benefit platforms that prioritize transparency, citations, and verifiability. And as the returns from simply adding more compute to LLMs diminish, interest in recursive self-improvement—Recursive AI’s focus—is likely to intensify.
The bottom line on the intersection of You.com and Recursive AI? Watch this space.
