Neeva will close on June 2. The ad-free search engine launched less than two years ago.
Neeva’s failure was due to its inability to attract enough users, the rise of generative AI and LLMs, and the current economic environment, according to company founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan.
Statement by Sridhar Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy he tweeted the next:
“This was a very difficult decision that took many things into consideration: our business progress to date, the current funding environment, and our ability to continue to grow rapidly in this very changed search environment. We are incredibly proud of what we achieved: building a search engine from scratch with a small team of fifty people and launching the world’s first LLM-based answer engine that produced reliable citations.”
Why we care Neeva’s search market share was small, but it offered an alternative to Google, which is always a good thing. Unfortunately, as has been the case with most Google alternatives, including Microsoft’s Bing, it’s nearly impossible to get people to break their Google habit.
Neeva’s story. The search engine was founded in 2019, but it wasn’t until June 2020 that we first reported on the new search engine. Neeva would be 100% ad-free and subscription-supported. Neeva also said it won’t track users, and that personalization is done without data mining.
Ramaswamy believed that the quality and usefulness of Google’s search results had been compromised by the focus on advertising revenue. Its mission was to “return search to its users”.
snow launched in the US in June 2021, charging users $4.95 per month. In an attempt to expand its user base in 2022, Neeva started offering a free basic subscription.
In January of this year, the company announced NeevaAI, a generative AI search product that answered queries with summaries and citations, beating out both Microsoft’s New Bing launch (announced on February 7) and generative Google search experience (not yet publicly released).
Read the announcement. Next steps for Neeva.
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