Search engines, which asked users to pay rather than view ads, struggled to attract subscribers.
Recently, it also started showing artificial intelligence-generated answers to your searches.
The company says it is now building on the expertise it has developed to provide these answers and is exploring other AI business opportunities.
The service will end on June 2nd, and users will be able to get a refund for the unused portion of their subscription.
“better choice”
Neeva was created by Sridhar Ramaswamy, who worked at Google for 16 years and ran an advertising business. He told BBC News that the tech sector has become “stealing” people’s data and that he doesn’t want to be involved anymore.
However, he and co-founder Vivek Ragunathan wrote on their blog: “Throughout this journey, I’ve 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.”
They faced “strong organizations with infinite resources” and “friction” such as requiring users to change their default search settings and not allowing users to switch.
The founders also blamed the “different economic environment” since the October launch.
“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. ‘, they said.
“immediate need”
The search engine employs about 50 people and raised $77.5 million (£68 million) from investors at launch.
The company said it is currently exploring commercial opportunities to apply its expertise in large scale language models (LLMs) to power AI, especially chatbots such as ChatGPT.
“Over the past year, we have recognized a pressing and distinct need to use LLM effectively, affordably, safely and responsibly,” said the founders. And the technology they’ve developed for his Neeva is what “businesses really want and need today.”
“We are actively exploring how our search and LLM expertise can be applied to these settings, and will provide updates on our work and the future of our team in the coming weeks. is,” they added.
