Neeva founders announce closure of paid search two years after launch

The businessmen announced the closure of Neeva on the company’s blog.

“It’s one thing to create a search engine, and quite another to convince ordinary users to switch to a better option,” Neeva’s co-founders admitted.

Ramaswami and Raghunathan said that while working on the search engine, they had to compete with large corporations with “infinite resources” with “a small team of 50 people.”

The entrepreneurs said that amid the current economic conditions, they are abandoning their attempts to build a business in the field of personalized search. The project will be closed on June 2, 2023, the startup will refund Neeva Premium owners the money for the unused part of the subscriptions, and will also delete all personal and payment data.

The founders of Neeva are proud that their search engine was the first to provide AI answers to most queries. The NeevaAI service was launched in January 2023.

The startup plans to continue its work in the field of artificial intelligence, where the company hopes to use the accumulated experience in the field of search and large language models. More specifically about the plans, Neeva expects to tell “in the coming weeks.”

Earlier this month, The Information reported that Neeva’s acquisition of cloud service Snowflake was being considered.

In 2020, the former head of Google’s advertising department, Sridhar Ramaswami, announced the launch of the Neeva search engine, which was supposed to compete directly with Google. Its feature is the absence of advertising and work on a subscription model. The project started in mid-2021 with a subscription price of $4.95.

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