Snowflake deal seems imminent as Neeva shuts down search and turns to enterprise LLMs

TO Snowflake try to acquire snow seems imminent after Neeva, the Mountain View, CA-based search startup once seen as a promising AI-powered challenger to Google’s search dominance, announced Saturday that it is shutting down its search product. for consumers to focus about LLM business use cases and search.

Neeva’s announcement came just days after reporting from The Information that Montana-based Snowflake had signed a letter of intent to acquire Neeva to provide AI software services to enterprise clients. snowflake actions leap with the news, which was notably before Snowflake’s programmed First quarter financial results announcements this Wednesday.

A Snowflake spokesperson declined to comment, while representatives for Neeva did not respond to VentureBeat’s disclosure.

Neeva Explores Enterprise LLM Use Cases

Neeva was co-founded in 2019 by former Google senior ad tech executives, including Google’s former SVP of ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy. More recently, Neeva had touted its AI-powered search engine’s ability to quote your sources.

in a blog post Announcing the closure of the consumer search product, Ramaswamy and co-founder Vivek Raghunathan said: “Over the past year, we have seen a clear and pressing need to use LLMs effectively, affordably, securely and responsibly. Many of the techniques that we’ve pioneered with small models, size reduction, latency reduction, and cost-effective implementation are the things that businesses really want and need today. We are actively exploring how we can apply our LLM and search expertise in these settings, and will provide updates on the future of our work and team in the coming weeks.”

Many AI companies are shifting their focus to the enterprise

Many technology leaders seek out the valuable opportunities of enterprise LLMs. OpenAI has spoken about its work to offer customizations for businesses, while Anthropic recently partnered with Scale AI for “bring generative AI to business.” Stability AI has said it wants to build custom models for the largest businesses and governments, while Cohere’s LLMs are entirely enterprise-oriented.

Experts, including EY global CTO Nicola Morini Bianzino, have been saying for months that the “killer use case” for generative AI could be enterprise knowledge management.

“Knowledge companies tend to store knowledge in a very flat, two-dimensional way that makes it difficult to access, interact and dialogue,” he told VentureBeat in January. “We tried 20, 30, 40 years ago to build expert systems. That didn’t go very well because they were too stiff. I think this technology promises to overcome many problems that expert systems have.”