# Neeva (2019 – 2023)

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/startup-graveyard/neeva/
- Sector: Consumer apps
- Country: United States
- Total funding: $77.5 million
- Cause of closure: Lost to competitors

## What did it do?

Neeva was a privacy-first internet search engine founded in 2019 by Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. It compiled ad-free, tracking-free search results by combining data from partners such as Microsoft Bing and Yelp with its own crawler. Users could also connect the content in their personal accounts and search it.

## Why did it shut down?

Search habits were extremely entrenched, and according to the founders' statement the main reason for the closure was the difficulty of persuading ordinary users to switch to a new search engine. Having given up advertising revenue, the model made the company's income depend on users moving to paid accounts. On 20 May 2023 the company announced that it would shut down its consumer search product and focus on super intelligence. The same month Snowflake announced that it had acquired Neeva for USD 185.4 million in cash, and the search engine closed on 2 June 2023.

## The story

In May 2023 Neeva's founders announced that they would shut down the search engine they had been working on for four years. The admission in their statement was striking: the biggest challenge had not been the technology but persuading ordinary users to change their habits and switch to a new search engine.

Neeva was founded in 2019 by Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. Ramaswamy had previously been one of the people running Google's advertising business; in 2020 The New York Times described him as a founder taking aim at his old company. The idea was to build a search engine that showed no ads and did not track its users. The Mountain View-based company had 25 employees in June 2020 and raised a total of USD 77.5 million from investors.

Neeva's results were compiled from different sources: for classic links it used its own crawler alongside partners such as Microsoft Bing, and it drew on the interfaces of sites such as Yelp for quick answers, The Weather Channel for weather and Apple for maps. Users could connect their personal accounts and search their own documents too. Having given up advertising revenue, the company also offered paid accounts. But however clean the product, changing the default search engine was a bothersome decision for most users, and Neeva did not reach enough of them to clear that threshold.

On 20 May 2023 the company announced that it would shut down its consumer search product and focus on super intelligence. A few days later the data cloud company Snowflake announced that it had acquired Neeva for USD 185.4 million in cash in order to add generative super intelligence-powered search to its own platform. The search engine closed on 2 June; the founders said they would refund users for the unused portion of their accounts. Ramaswamy later became chief executive of Snowflake. The BBC, which had introduced Neeva in October 2022 as a tracking-free search engine founded by a former Google advertising executive, reported its closure only seven months later.

Neeva's story shows that in a consumer market, even a sound idea, a strong team and enough capital may not be enough to break an entrenched habit. The company lost as a product; but its team and technology found a buyer in an entirely different market.

## Lessons

- If you are taking on a habit people repeat dozens of times a day without thinking, being slightly better is not enough; find a distribution channel that makes switching effortless.
- If you plan to offer a paid consumer product, test early and at small scale how many people will actually pay.
- Even if your product closes, the value of the team and the infrastructure can endure; build your technology so it can be adapted to other markets.

## Sources

- [Neeva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neeva)
- [Neeva: Ad-free search engine shuts down](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65671468)
- [Neeva, co-founded by a former Google exec, to shut down its consumer search product and focus on A.I.](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/20/neeva-co-founded-by-a-former-google-exec-to-shut-down-its-consumer-search-product-and-focus-on-ai.html)
- [A Former Google Executive Takes Aim at His Old Company With a Start-Up](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-executive.html)