The Venture Codex Logo

The Venture Codex

DuckDuckGo

20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, Pennsylvania, 19301, United States

Overview

DuckDuckGo is an independent Internet privacy company for everyone who's had enough of hidden online tracking and wants to take back their privacy now. Founded in 2008 as a privacy protecting alternative to Google Search, today DuckDuckGo has more than 100 million users worldwide and provides users with an all-in-one privacy solution through the DuckDuckGo web browser, available on mobile and desktop devices. Unlike most popular browsers, DuckDuckGo has powerful privacy protections built in, including our search engine that doesn’t spy on your searches and over a dozen other privacy protections active by default.

Total investments
2
Lead investments
0
Investments · 12mo
1
Active investors
8

Sector focus

  • Internet
  • Privacy
  • Search Engine
Visit website

Investment portfolio

  • Cloaked

    Participated · Series B · Mar 2026

    Founded in 2020, Cloaked provides a bundle of consumer privacy and security products such as multiple digital identities (emails, phone numbers, passwords), data removal services, identity theft insurance, VPN, and dark web monitoring. It has added AI-powered call screening and is expanding that screening to text messages, email, and browsing, while testing an AI agent that can take actions like changing compromised passwords. The company reported 10x growth last year, more than 350,000 paying customers, protection of over 10 million identities, cleanup of more than 1 billion records from data broker sites, and processing over 50 million scam or spam phone calls since launching call screening. Cloaked is beginning to roll out enterprise offerings that provide employees alerts, and give CISOs aggregated risk and remediation visibility. The startup has nearly 70 employees and intends to expand hiring across product, engineering, enterprise sales, and international markets, and competes with companies including 1Password, Gaurdio, Firefox, Proton, and Mozilla.

  • You.com

    Participated · Series B · Sep 2024

    You.com is a Palo Alto, CA-based enterprise AI infrastructure company that offers an AI-powered, chat-first search and productivity platform. Led by Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, its assistant integrates real-time web search, multimodal AI capabilities, and customizable solutions for consumers and enterprises. The company processes over 1 billion queries monthly via its API for customers including DuckDuckGo, Windsurf, and Harvey across technology, e-commerce, financial services, media, manufacturing and hospitality. You.com raised $100M in a Series C at a $1.5B valuation, which it plans to use to expand operations and accelerate development efforts. The round was led by Cox Enterprises with participation from existing investors Georgian, Salesforce Ventures and Norwest. Its product and API positioning target both consumer productivity and enterprise deployments. You.com builds an AI search "productivity engine" focused on answering complex, research-style queries that require fetching and evaluating up-to-date documents. The product chains searches and retrievals, returning deep-linked citations that highlight relevant source text to improve traceability. The company relies on external LLMs (including Claude and ChatGPT) and tightly controls prompting to reduce hallucinations and ensure more reliable outputs. It also demonstrated a collaborative “multiplayer” workspace where multiple users can add documents, summarize, and query with shared visibility. Commercially, You.com says subscribers are five times higher than at the start of the year, some enterprise customers use the service millions of times per day, and unit economics for large enterprise deals are positive. CEO Richard Socher says the company is monetizing selectively and is preparing to scale. You.com builds an AI-driven search engine that uses models to understand queries, rank results, and analyze inputs in multiple languages, including programming languages. The company is developing multimodal search so users can add elements beyond text and receive richer, app‑style answers within a chat. Founder Richard Socher says the product can surface interactive apps (for example, a stock app) directly inside conversations rather than inventing information. You.com positions itself as an open, user‑focused alternative to Google, emphasizing apps and reduced advertising. The firm launched in late 2020 and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. The article does not disclose revenue or user metrics; it notes a $25M financing raised last year to advance product development. You.com bills itself as an open search engine that leverages natural language processing (NLP) to understand queries, rank results, and summarize content from across the web. The platform offers extensibility through built-in search apps so users can complete tasks without leaving the results page and can parse queries into different languages including programming languages. The company emphasizes user control and personalization, and it currently offers a “zero trace” incognito mode and an ad-free experience while committing not to sell personal information or run targeted, privacy-invading ads. You.com launched a public beta and says it will use recently raised funds for user growth, product development, and technology to scale the platform. Founded in 2020 by Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, the company has about 30 employees. The team positions You.com as a privacy-forward alternative to incumbent search engines and aims to give users and content creators more agency over first-page search results.

Team

  • Gabriel Weinberg

    Founder & CEO

    LinkedIn
  • Caine Tighe

    CTO

  • Christopher Calvi

    Business Development / Partnerships

    LinkedIn
  • Zachary Pappis

    VP, Insights

    LinkedIn