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Can Neeva Beat Google? (And Microsoft…and Time?)
The Very Hardest Thing
What’s the hardest thing you could do as a tech-driven startup? I’ve been asked that question a few times over the years, and my immediate answer is always the same: Trying to beat Google in search. A few have tried — DuckDuckGo has built itself a sizable niche business, and there’s always Bing, thought it’s stuck at less than ten percent of Google’s market (and Microsoft isn’t exactly a startup.) But it’s damn hard to find venture money for a company whose mission is to disrupt the multi-hundred billion dollar search market — and for good reason. Google is just too damn well positioned, and if Microsoft can’t unseat them, how the hell could a small team of upstarts?
But despite what might be the harshest environment in a generation for moon-shot startups, one relatively obscure company has been unwaveringly focused on beating Google for the past four years. It’s called Neeva, and with nearly $100 million in funding, it’s a serious contender. Neeva’s founders have decades of experience running key parts of the Google empire (Google Ads and Youtube monetization). They left in 2018 to pursue a mission to free search from what the company calls “Corporate Influence” — in other words, the very business models they worked on for years.
To that end, Neeva launched in June of 2021 with a freemium subscription model — you can access a limited version of it for free, but roughly $50 a year buys you a clean, uncompromising search engine that delivers results unburdened by the data-drenched compromises inherent in surveillance capitalism.
But while I’ve quietly cheered for Neeva these past 18 months, I’ll admit I’ve not become a subscriber. I want them to succeed, but I was too invested in my web of Google entanglements — Mail, Docs, Chrome, etc. — to make the switch. Plus, I know how hard it is to build a subscription business — asking people to change long held habits is a very, very tough slog. Neeva’s founders, technology, and philosophy were noble and commendable, but the chances of it actually breaking through seemed … slim. Not only must the company build and maintain a better search engine — an incredibly hard (and expensive) feat — it also has to completely change the business model that…
