With more than 1 million users, Neeva follows European launch by bringing private search to Canada, putting users’ privacy first

Search engine Neeva has launched in Canada to provide a safe, secure and ad-free web search platform alternative to Google; free of tracking, advertisements or affiliate links found in traditional search.

Placing the control back into the hands of consumers, Neeva allows users to customize their web search experiences without the sway of corporate bias. Many consumers have had no choice but to settle for search engines like Google, which sells customer data to advertisers and allows for third party tracking – Neeva never sacrifices privacy for quality, with a focus on transparent and personalized ad-free web browsing.

Founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube), Neeva is reinventing web search for good, challenging Google’s long-standing web-search reign. The company has raised over $80m from investors like Sequoia Capital, Greylock Ventures, Inovia Capital, and Neythri Futures Fund. Additionally, Neeva had a successful 2021 $40m Series B funding round.

“The modern-day internet has become heavily ad-dependent for no reason other than Big Tech’s self-serving exploitation of consumers’ data and privacy. With recent legislation and proposals in Canada that prioritize user privacy and limit Big Tech’s power over consumers, we’re excited to give Canadians an alternative option with Neeva.”

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Neeva’s Canadian expansion follows a successful launch in Europe in October 2022. Within 24 hours of launch, Neeva had over 30k sign-ups and was the third most searched term on Google. In light of the growing demand for digital identity protections in Canada, Neeva delivers honest results without ever comprising user data. Free from the standard influence of Big Tech and advertisers, Neeva users are empowered to select their information sources, such as news outlets, shopping, travel and others based on personal preference and relevance.

“The internet has evolved away from users and caters towards advertisers above all else,” said Neeva CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. “Canada has always been at the forefront when it comes to privacy, and we at Neeva are excited to officially bring our localized and private-first search engine to Canadians.”

To date, search alternatives have mostly offered stronger privacy but at the expense of diminished search quality. Since Neeva operates its own independent search stack (crawling, indexing and serving at scale), it never sacrifices accuracy for speed. Returning lightning-fast results with high levels of accuracy, drawing from an index of billions of web pages, all without ads. This unique independent search stack frees Neeva to rewrite the rules of the web search, developing user-first features with the sole principle of providing top tier results in the most efficient way possible, plus all with the strong privacy users should expect and demand from today’s internet experience. It’s easy for users to search across their most important personal documents while maintaining strict privacy controls, since Neeva enables connections to email, Dropbox, Slack, Figma, and others.

Moreover, Neeva is leading a new frontier search by leveraging in-house LLMs and refined training models with its full system search stack to bring authentic real time AI search to the masses. NeevaAI solves two significant shortcomings of the current AI tools such as ChatGPT which are 1) the lack of references or citations associated with answers and 2) the failure to provide real time information.

“Neeva is ready to challenge the corporate bias of Big Tech, giving consumers a long overdue improved searching and browsing experience,” said Mr. Ramaswamy. “The modern-day internet has become heavily ad-dependent for no reason other than Big Tech’s self-serving exploitation of consumers’ data and privacy. With recent legislation and proposals in Canada that prioritize user privacy and limit Big Tech’s power over consumers, we’re excited to give Canadians an alternative option with Neeva.”

Neeva is growing fast, achieving more than 1 million monthly users up from 600K following the recent launch in Europe in October 2022.

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