Neeva: A Different Way to Search
Information discovery has always been a fertile ground for innovation. We backed Oracle’s efforts to organize relational data in the early ’80s. We partnered with Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1995 — just after they founded Yahoo! in a trailer. And in 1999, we were early believers in Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they created Google and transformed the modern day user experience for information retrieval.
Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and, more recently, Amazon, have become central to how we all search for information. Their advertising-based monetization models have yielded extraordinary economics. Yet, these very models can sit in tension with delivering the very best user experiences. They’ve given rise to concerns about the objectivity of the rankings. They can be problematic from a privacy point of view. Over time, more and more of the user experience is dominated by highly-placed advertising and promotional content, rather than the desired, original informational content. Adversaries of consumer search have made it difficult — if not nearly impossible — to assess expertise and authenticity for even the best source material. Perhaps most importantly, they fail to meet the demands of today’s digital world: how do we search when the information we seek no longer lives in tidy public databases or indexable websites, but everywhere we work — in our personal email, on a hundred different cloud applications, on our private desktops and inside our personal phones?
We continue to believe there is room in the space to innovate. We are excited to announce our partnership today with Neeva as they emerge from stealth. Neeva is experimenting with a different way to search. Led by Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, Neeva changes the way we surface information — from public and tracked to private, protected and personal.
The end result is a novel approach to holistic search with an entirely new experience for surfacing what you seek. Your information is private with Neeva. Your data belongs to you and is never sold to advertisers. You can search for hiking boots and be shown sites that empower you to make a better decision about which hiking boots to buy — rather than a list of product ads. You control exactly what you’re searching for — whether it’s on the public web or in personal accounts you choose to connect. At its core, Neeva is a private, personal hub for all the information that matters most to you.
Neeva’s founders both immigrated to the United States from India and met at Google. Sridhar started as a systems architect at Google before rising through the ranks to become the SVP of advertising and commerce. Vivek joined Google as an engineer of machine learning and alternative search methodologies before rising to become VP in advertising.
We are thrilled to co-lead the Series A with Reid Hoffman and Asheem Chandna at Greylock. We look forward to partnering with Neeva’s exceptional team as they forge a new path for search.
