Sridhar Ramaswamy
Krystian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Neeva, a privacy research company co-founded by the former Google CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy announced on Saturday that it was shutting down its consumer search engine and would focus on researching AI use cases.
IN blog post on the corporate’s website, Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, one other co-founder of Neeva, wrote that “getting on users was really hard.” They said this challenge, as well as to a “different economic environment”, made it clear that the consumer-seeking business was not sustainable.
“This has been a very difficult decision that has taken under consideration many things: the progress of our business thus far, the present funding environment and our ability to proceed to grow rapidly on this greatly modified search environment,” Ramaswamy said in tweet Saturday.
A representative for Neeva didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ramaswamy built Neeva in 2019 after leaving his position as Google’s senior vp of promoting a 12 months earlier, which he said stemmed from disillusionment with the corporate’s relentless emphasis on sustaining growth on the expense of users.
According to the post, Neeva will explore the use cases of generative AI and large language models in search. Neeva.com and its consumer search engine will shut down in the subsequent few weeks.
Neeva users with a prepaid Neeva Premium subscription will receive a refund for the unused portion, and the corporate can also be deleting all user data as a part of the shutdown, Ramaswamy and Raghunathan said in a blog post.
The administrators said they’ll have more to say about Neeva’s future in the approaching weeks.