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.
