This week, cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake announced it is acquiring Neeva, a California-based search engine developer. While the companies declined to disclose the financial details, they explained that the deal was to add generative AI-based search to Snowflake’s Data Cloud platform. According to VentureBeat, the acquisition was first announced during Snowflake’s earnings call.
Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, said: “Engagement with data through natural language is becoming popular with advances in AI. This will enable Snowflake users and application developers to build rich search and conversation experiences. We believe Neeva will broaden our ability to help non-technical users extract value from their data.”
Neeva was founded in 2019 by Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, both of whom worked at Google’s advertising technology division. The search startup raised $77.5 million in funding before being acquired by Snowflake. Last week, Neeva announced that it was abandoning its consumer search product to focus on business use cases of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
Benoit Dageville, co-founder and VP of products at Snowflake, explained in a blog post how the companies will be working together. He said: “The ability for teams to discover just the right data point, data asset, or data insight is critical to maximizing the value of data. Neeva has created a transformative search experience that leverages generative AI and other innovations to empower users to query and discover data in new ways. We plan to bring and leverage these innovations across the Data Cloud for the benefit of our customers, partners and developers.”
In summary, the acquisition of Neeva by Snowflake will allow the company to tap into some of the most advanced search technologies available and take search and conversation in Snowflake to a new level.
