Neeva was positioning itself as private search, that was high quality and was going to deliver “answers”. They looked oh so cool and useful until ChatGPT erupted on the scene and got 10billion in funding. Then Bing began to offer many of the features of Neeva minus the privacy. Now Snowflake has a team of smart kids with AI skills, and it makes total sense to accelerate their product roadmaps this way. Tough for the Neeva crew, they got caught in an innovation tidalwave.
Snowflake seems like it's been losing relevance ever since Clickhouse became more popular. Seems like they're struggling to maintain performance vs the other competitors out there. Not sure how this acquisition will help here. I don't think decoupling storage and compute was a good bet in the long run.
The statements says mainly "That’s why Snowflake is acquiring Neeva, a search company founded to make search even more intelligent at scale. Neeva created a unique and transformative search experience that leverages generative AI and other innovations to allow users to query and discover data in new ways."<p>Was Neeva providing useful tooling for this kind of search? I am unfamiliar with Neeva, never used it before. Is this a really useful thing or an acquisition for the investors for a startup to make sure their fund meets a return target?
Related: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013783" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013783</a> ("We will be shutting down neeva.com")
The stock market reacted quite positively to this acquisition (Basically confirmed a few days ago). Buying a soon-bankrupt startup is very cheap, and getting a strong tech stack and already formed team with strategic synergies with the main business is going to be valuable.<p>This is contrasted with panic acquisitions like say Adobe & Figma.
Could anyone with more info potentially speculate on what a theoretical acquisition of this kind would look like for the founders?<p>I have to assume founders are basically wiped out entirely by preferred shares / levered shares given to investors? Staff with equity obviously wiped out as well?<p>Seems like a situation where early investors enter the FIFO queue to recoup as much of their original investment as possible?
Another 'incredible journey', that has failed to beat Google and ran out of VC money to even begin to challenge them or make any money.<p>Most likely got acquired for less than the valuation the founders desired.
Being in enterprise software I have heard AI/Generative AI so many times since chatgpt became mainstream. Every fortune company I have spoken to wants to get on this train.
I am both unhappy and excited. Hopefully Snowflake does something interesting that is consumer facing so I can utilize it.
But god I wish there was more innovation and competition in the premium search engine space; I was so happy with Neeva and excited for its future