SAN FRANCISCO, June 17 (Reuters) - The startup behind

You.com is raising $50 million in fresh capital, a person

familiar with the effort said, as it seeks a foothold in the

growing market for assistants with artificial intelligence.

The near-finished Series B funding would value the

four-year-old company behind You.com, SuSea Inc, between $700

million and $900 million, the person told Reuters.

After ChatGPT ignited interest in You.com's AI-infused

search engine in early 2023, some of its users began looking

elsewhere. Microsoft ( MSFT ) 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 rise in web traffic, but the number was still below

its 20 million peak in February 2023, according to Similarweb

data. Its app downloads have decreased an estimated 69% so far

in 2024, versus the same period last year, said Sensor Tower, a

market intelligence firm. Other AI startups have faced similar

headwinds.

Against this backdrop, the Palo Alto, California-based

company has morphed You.com into an AI assistant, one that's

focused on productivity as well as internet search, its website

shows.

Richard Socher, its 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.

Socher did not answer a request for comment on this story.

The market for powerful AI assistants is nascent and

crowded. Google, Microsoft ( MSFT ), ChatGPT's creator OpenAI, and now

Apple ( AAPL ) 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 AI

models from across industry plus other productivity tools.

Alternative subscriptions from Google, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and OpenAI cost

about $20 monthly.

The person familiar with You.com's fundraising said its

sales are on the rise. Since January, the company's annual

recurring revenue has grown five times, the person said, without

specifying the figure in dollar terms. You.com has both consumer

and business-to-business subscription revenue, the person said.

Venture capital firm Georgian is leading the fundraising,

with capital also provided by previous backers of You.com, the

person said.

Georgian representatives did not respond to a request for

comment.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Additional

reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Muralikumar

Anantharaman)