Challenger search engine Neeva is at least not what it is today, as the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has announced it will scale back its consumer-facing business.
Founders Sridhar Ramaswami and Vivek Raghnathan said in a blog post yesterday that they are facing significant challenges to attract new users, coupled with the difficult economic environment all businesses are currently facing. said it was no longer possible to continue on its current course.
“There is no longer a path to sustainable business creation in consumer search,” they write. “As a result, in the coming weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product and moving to a new focus.”
Founded in 2019 by former Googlers Ramaswamy, Raghunathan and Neeva Ad-free, subscription-only (i.e. paid) search engine launched in the US Two years agoBefore addition Free tier added after 6 months. In the months that followed, Neeva said she had over 600,000 users, most of whom were on the free plan. Seeking growth, Neeva will begin her rapid global rollout in October, starting with Europe, then using a new generative AI engine that combines multiple results and sources to create her single answer. , embarked on an attempt to reinvent the entire search experience.
The popular thought was the death of “10 blue links”.
How NeevaAI Works image credit: TechCrunch
Neeva is also working on a standalone generative AI search app called Gist, which was already available on Android, but its iOS release, scheduled for the end of March, continued to be delayed with little explanation. was
David vs Goliath & Goliath
The number of job cuts in tech over the past year underscores the severe economic headwinds facing even the largest companies, and Neva should not have been affected. The company has raised more than $75 million since its inception, including funding from high-profile backers like Sequoia and Greylock, but more than two years after raising its Series B funding, Neeva is likely about a Series C round. I should have been thinking After all, it was clearly not planned.
Neeva’s promise of a true alternative to Google was largely based on an ad-free experience and a proprietary search stack, but the bottom line is that pulling Google off its lofty perch will always be a big undertaking. I’m saying that. That’s what well-funded rival Microsoft recently tried to do by introducing a bit of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, and Google hopes to accelerate its work with Bard in this area. Became.
So while this was clearly a David vs. Goliath & Goliath case, Neeva had backup from other challengers like You.com and Brave. What is clear from all of this is that Neeva hasn’t grown as much as her company and her investors hoped. But the founders affirm that convincing users to pay for ad-free search won’t be difficult. In fact, the main challenge was getting the incumbents (mainly Google) to switch.
“Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience is actually a lot less difficult than getting them to try a new search engine in the first place. ,” the founders wrote. “Throughout this journey, I have learned that building a search engine is one thing, and convincing regular users of the need to switch to a better option is one thing. From the necessary and unnecessary friction to the challenges in getting people to understand the difference between search engines and browsers, it’s been really hard to get users.”
Enterprise search
As part of the consumer-facing business shutdown, Niva said it would issue refunds to users with paid subscriptions and delete all user data. But this does not mean the end of Niva. The company has previously hinted at future monetization plans beyond paid subscriptions, including licensing agreements to boost application searches within enterprises. And now that it’s downsizing a major part of its business, this could be a route the company pursues more quickly.
Earlier this week, reports surfaced that Neeva was in talks with cloud giant Snowflake about a potential acquisition, but given news that Neeva is moving away from consumer-facing, such a deal could be a deal. makes a lot of sense. It basically takes the work you’ve already done with Large Language Models (LLM) and search and uses it for very specific use cases, especially within companies that don’t want to rely on technology provided by Google or the like. Or Microsoft, or you don’t want to start your own in-house development from scratch.
But Neeva has yet to reveal any specifics on what it plans to do next, whether it will do so as part of a larger company or license its technology for use by other companies.
“Over the past year, we have recognized a pressing and distinct need to use LLM effectively, affordably, safely and responsibly,” the founders concluded. . “Many of the technologies we have pioneered, such as small models, reduced size, reduced latency, and low cost of deployment, are what businesses really want and need today. We are actively looking at how we can apply our expertise to these settings and will provide an update on our work and the future of the team in the coming weeks.”
