You.com, a startup looking to develop a more customizable search engine, announced $20 million investment led by the venture fund of Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff.
Benioff’s involvement with the startup includes the transfer of the You.com domain name, which he has owned since the 1990s.
Beyond Benioff’s TIME Ventures, other investors include Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures and Day One Ventures.
Founded by two former top AI scientists at Salesforce, You.com lets users set preferred websites. For instance, users who like to get information from Reddit and Yelp would see rows of search results from those services before links from the broader web.
You.com will not track users across the web nor sell “privacy-invasive ads”, according to co-founder and CEO Richard Socher. He added the company will not log searches and clicks when users opt for an incognito mode.
The startup aims to collect fees for facilitating transactions like food orders or flight bookings, and wants to help other publishers generate revenue through ads embedded among search results.
New antitrust rules would help You.com grow, Socher said, adding that popular browsers owned by Apple and Google in the name of security make it difficult for users to replace Google as the default search.
