Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Leads $20M in Search Engine Platform You.com

Search Engine Platform You.com Raised $20M

Search engine startup You.com announced that it has raised $20 million, with a goal of unseating Google from its longstanding search engine dominance, Reuters reported Tuesday (Nov. 9).

TIME Ventures, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s venture fund, led the investment, and Benioff will transfer the You.com domain name, which he bought in the 1990s, according to the report. He would not comment on terms of the URL exchange.

“We’re at a critical inflection point in the internet’s history, and we must take steps to restore trust online,” Benioff said in a statement, per the report, calling You.com “the future of search.”

TIME Ventures was joined by Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures and Day One Ventures as investors in You.com, which was founded last year by two former Salesforce AI scientists. The platform lets users set preferred websites for their searches that appear before links from the broader web, according to the report.

You.com vows not to track users across the web nor sell “privacy-invasive ads,” according to Co-Founder and CEO Richard Socher, who added his company won’t log searches and clicks for users who choose incognito mode, the report stated.

The company plans to charge fees on food orders and flight bookings and will push to help other publishers make money through embedded ads mixed in with search results, according to the report.

Meanwhile, Salesforce and DocuSign have expanded their partnership to include new solutions for customers to sign agreements, making it easier to prepare contracts, quotes, invoices and other documents.

Read more: Salesforce, DocuSign Pair to Digitize Contracts With AI Through Slack

The new tool will track and enforce contract terms and manage them across numerous platforms. The platform automates the contract process with smart artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, which should improve collaboration with organizations through Slack functions.