Great product, quick to innovate: Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy praises Aravind Srinivas for Perplexity's success

AI data cloud firm Snowflake’s Chief Executive Officer Sridhar Ramaswamy believes Perplexity’s strategy of Application Programming Interface (API)-driven approach allowed it to innovate quickly and build a successful product, while Neeva’s focus on creating a search engine from scratch proved unsustainable.

“At Neeva, we spent three years creating a search engine from scratch, where we did the crawl, we did the indexing, we did a lot of heavy work. Perplexity came quite a bit later, and they simply relied on APIs and produced a great product. That really was what drove the positive momentum for the company. All startups have limited shelf lives in terms of how much you can keep going. My team in the last year sort of was tired of the uncertainty of being a startup and the relentless number of fundraising rounds that you must do. Perplexity created a great product, and they've been very quick to innovate. I give Aravind (Aravind Srinivas, founder)—also an IIT-Madras graduate, a lot of credit. What they have done is truly remarkable,” Ramaswamy told Moneycontrol in an interview.

While both Perplexity and Neeva used artificial intelligence (AI) to build advanced ad-free search engines, later acquired by Snowflake in 2023.

Neeva was conceptualised by Ramaswamy and his former Google colleague Vivek Raghunathan to provide an alternative to Google and prioritising user experience. Founded in 2019, Neeva raised over $70 million in funding before being acquired by Snowflake.