Earlier this week Snowflake acquired Neeva, a startup trying to make an ad-free search engine powered by generative AI. But it didn’t acquire a search engine—and stories like Neeva’s acquihire are ones that we’ll see a lot in the coming years.

Neeva had raised around $77.5m from investors including Sequoia and Greylock, led by former Google ads boss Sridhar Ramaswamy. It sold to Snowflake for $150m, per what I’ve heard, and snowflake was one of multiple companies evaluating it.

Neeva went for an AI-powered experience earlier this year, but that wasn’t the issue—people were already duct taped to google and bing, and the cognitive switching cost created an enormous barrier to growth, even if Neeva was able to get to AI powered results faster.

As fast as AI is developing, consumers are still very much locked in their ways and it’s an uphill battle to change core behaviors. And the tools they (and many future consumer AI startups) built were uniquely suited to enterprise use cases.

For Snowflake, it gets a little interesting. They already host so much company data—the kind of data that’ll get used for fine-tuning—and just need a team that has experience with model dev/production to figure out that workflow.

One small wrinkle: a big driving factor for the acquihire was getting Sridhar in the door. Adrien Treuille, the founder of Streamlit, has lately assumed more oversight for broader ML beyond just Streamlit. So we will have to see how the or chart plays out.