Big Data

Snowflake Bolsters Information Cloud Search Capabilities with Neeva Acquisition

May 25, 2023

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Snowflake has introduced it can purchase search specialist Neeva for an undisclosed quantity.

“Search is prime to how companies work together with knowledge,” mentioned Snowflake Co-founder Benoit Dageville in a weblog submit. “The power for groups to find exactly the correct knowledge level, knowledge asset, or knowledge perception is vital to maximizing the worth of knowledge. That’s why Snowflake is buying Neeva, a search firm based to make search much more clever at scale,” he wrote.

Dageville says Snowflake will infuse and leverage Neeva’s search capabilities throughout the Snowflake Information Cloud. “As a part of the acquisition, we’re joined by a few of the brightest minds working in search at this time. Neeva’s management and crew members have been instrumental within the creation of quite a few profitable merchandise like Google’s search promoting and YouTube monetization,” mentioned Dageville.

Neeva was based in 2019 by Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, former members of Google’s promoting know-how crew. The agency was based with the intention to create a subscription-based search engine with privateness and outcomes on the forefront, as an alternative of adverts, and the corporate beforehand raised $77.5 million to take action.

“We began Neeva with the mission to take search again to its customers. Having labored on search and search adverts for over a decade, we sincerely believed that there was area for a mannequin of search that put consumer and never advertiser pursuits first—a non-public, ad-free expertise,” the founders wrote in a weblog submit final week, including that regardless of the corporate’s smaller dimension, it constructed a search stack from the bottom up.

However in early 2022, the founders say the intensifying drumbeats of generative AI and LLMs led them to alter course. They included LLMs into the Neeva stack to create a solution engine that might present cited, real-time solutions to queries.

The corporate confronted the robust headwind of low consumer adoption attributable to friction associated to default search settings and search engine loyalty: “These headwinds, mixed with the completely different financial setting, have made it clear that there isn’t a longer a path in the direction of making a sustainable enterprise in shopper search. Consequently, over the subsequent few weeks, we will probably be shutting down neeva.com and our shopper search product, and shifting to a brand new space of focus,” the founders wrote.

It seems this new space of focus has arrived for Neeva with Snowflake’s acquisition. Snowflake shares had been down 12% yesterday after the corporate introduced the acquisition and issued weak steering on its earnings report. Although the corporate’s income grew 48% YoY in Q1 of fiscal yr 2024, it was lower than the 85% enhance within the prior-year fiscal quarter. Moreover, Snowflake posted a web lack of $225.6 million, or 70 cents per share, in contrast with a lack of $165.8 million, or 53 cents per share, throughout the identical interval a yr earlier.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman commented on the acquisition in an organization earnings name: “Participating with knowledge by way of pure language is changing into in style with developments in AI. This may allow Snowflake customers and utility builders to construct wealthy search-enabled and conversational experiences, and we imagine Neeva will enhance our alternative to permit non-technical customers to extract worth from their knowledge, extra broadly.”