Saahil Jain on Pulse 2.0: Building the AI Search Infrastructure Layer

Summary

Pulse 2.0 interviews You.com CTO Saahil Jain about his path from Stanford's machine learning research to becoming a founding engineer at You.com, and about how the company went from a consumer AI search engine to search infrastructure for AI agents. Jain walks through the company's origins, products, milestones, customers, and long-term goals.

He describes You.com's Search, Contents, and Research APIs, the customers that rely on them, and the company's aim to become the default search layer for enterprise AI.

Key highlights

Background. Jain studied computer science at Columbia and then did his master's at Stanford in Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Group, focusing on deep learning and NLP in healthcare settings with limited labeled data. He joined You.com in December 2020 as a founding engineer, later became Head of AI, and was recently named CTO.
How the company started. He says CEO Richard Socher was convinced that language models were about to change search, and that You.com began using large language models in search as early as September 2021.
First to connect LLMs to the live web. Jain says that just weeks after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, You.com was the first to connect LLMs to real-time web data with verifiable citations, addressing outdated information and hallucinations.
Products. You.com offers Search, Contents, and Research APIs for developers. Jain says the Search API handles more than 1 billion queries a month for customers such as DuckDuckGo, Windsurf, Harvey, and Databricks.
Milestones. He points to the ARI deep research agent in February 2025, a $100 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation in September 2025, and the Research API launched in February 2026, which he says ranked first on the DeepSearchQA benchmark with 83.67% accuracy.
Customer examples. Databricks integrated the Search API into its Unity Catalog, DuckDuckGo uses it for breaking news, Windsurf uses it to give coding agents access to current documentation, and You.com is a default search provider for OpenAI's open-weight GPT models.
Market and goals. Jain sees the market as every company building AI applications that need accurate, current information, and says the goal is to become the default search infrastructure layer for enterprise AI. In his words, "We want 'powered by You.com' to be a sign of the highest reliability."