AI Search Engine Neeva Acquired By Snowflake

Former search engine Neeva was acquired by knowledge cloud platform firm Snowflake, hinting at future integration of the Neeva AI search expertise into their merchandise.

Neeva

Neeva was based by two former Google executives with a imaginative and prescient to create a search engine that didn’t present advertisements or promote person knowledge.

Their path to monetization was based mostly on the concept shoppers who valued their privateness would subscribe to a search engine that supplied a greater person expertise.

Their preliminary option to construct a shopper search engine was a considerably me-too transfer in a tricky market the place even an enormous competitor like Microsoft had bother prying customers away from the behavior of Googling for solutions.

Nonetheless Neeva attracted investments by high Silicon Valley corporations like Sequoia Capital, an early investor in corporations resembling Google, Apple and Snowflake.

The Neeva group pivoted to creating an AI enhanced search engine and unveiled it in early 2023. But it surely was shortly overshadowed by Microsoft’s integration of AI.

After a couple of months it apparently grew to become evident that AI wasn’t sufficient to realize extra customers and a path to monetization so on Might 20, 2023 they selected to shut the search engine and discover how one can leverage their AI experience within the enterprise sector.

They wrote:

“Over the previous 12 months, we’ve seen the clear, urgent want to make use of LLMs successfully, inexpensively, safely, and responsibly.

Lots of the strategies we now have pioneered with small fashions, measurement discount, latency discount, and cheap deployment are the weather that enterprises really need, and wish, at this time.

We’re actively exploring how we are able to apply our search and LLM experience in these settings, and we are going to present updates on the way forward for our work and our group within the subsequent few weeks.”

Snowflake Acquires Neeva

It didn’t take lengthy to seek out that new path as 4 days afterward Might 24, 2023 Snowflake introduced they had been buying Neeva.

Snowflake, an enterprise knowledge cloud firm that intends to leverage the Neeva search and conversational AI expertise into their product choices.

The acquisition announcement acknowledged:

“Search is prime to how companies work together with knowledge, and the search expertise is evolving quickly with new conversational paradigms rising in the best way we ask questions and retrieve data, enabled by generative AI.

The power for groups to find exactly the fitting knowledge level, knowledge asset, or knowledge perception is vital to maximizing the worth of information.

That’s why Snowflake is buying Neeva, a search firm based to make search much more clever at scale.

Neeva created a novel and transformative search expertise that leverages generative AI and different improvements to permit customers to question and uncover knowledge in new methods.”

Snowflake was not particular about new companies they are going to supply however combining AI and LLM capabilities with knowledge is a pure match which will allow corporations to leverage their knowledge in new methods.

Learn the official announcement by Snowflake:

Snowflake acquires Neeva to accelerate search in the Data Cloud through generative AI

Featured picture by Shutterstock/Poetra.RH