Former Google employees raise 40 million for search engine without ads

Two former Google employees raised $40 million to build a search engine without ads. Neeva uses subscriptions and currently has a waiting list.

Neeva says it has raised $40 million or $33 million in a so-called Series B fundraising round from an investment company. Among other things, this improves the infrastructure of the search engine. Neeva also plans to become active outside the US in the coming months.

The search engine is currently only available in the US and users must register themselves on a waiting list. Neeva wants to expand to Western European countries and other countries where English is widely spoken.

Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. At Google, they headed the advertising departments at Google and YouTube, but said in an interview last year that they saw that the advertising model for search engines was no longer tenable. Neeva therefore works with a subscription model. It is possible to link other services such as calendars and e-mail to the search engine. They can then search there.