What Neeva's quiet exit tells us about the future of AI startups

Author’s note: while today’s issue is focused on Snowflake’s acquisition of Neeva, I wanted to touch on the Nvidia stock market jump briefly—so it’ll be structured a little differently today.

In addition, next week will be the final week where Supervised is a completely free product. Beginning in June I will be moving one issue per week behind a paywall, in addition to all posts that are more than two weeks old. You can read more about it below.

Snowflake, synonymous with the data warehouse, has been trying to crack into machine learning and data science for a few years through a variety of strategies like supporting Python and acquiring machine learning platform Streamlit for an eye-popping $800 million.

This week it acquired another well-known generative AI startup, Neeva, founded by the former Google advertising lead Sridhar Ramaswamy. But Snowflake is not buying an AI-powered search engine with Neeva.

Neeva’s acquisition—or acquihire, as most people consider it—feels like the current nature of the AI industry summed up: technology in service to an ambiguous end-user (consumer vs. enterprise), star power draw, immense opportunity, and enormous vulnerability to the largest incumbents.

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