In a surprising announcement, Neeva, a startup that aimed to challenge the dominance of Google Search, revealed that it is shutting down its search engine. The company plans to pivot towards AI and may potentially be acquired by Snowflake, according to a report by The Information. The decision to shut down suggests that Neeva believes it failed to achieve its ambitious goals.
Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan acknowledged the challenges of building search engines in a blog post announcing the shutdown. Ramaswamy, a former head of Google’s ad business, brought valuable expertise to Neeva’s efforts. The co-founders stated that Neeva successfully built a competitive search engine, even surpassing Google in certain aspects such as visual presentation and human-curated information.