In an unassuming office on a quiet, mostly residential street in Mountain View, California located eight minutes from Googles sprawling headquarters a couple of ex-Googlers and their team of 50 are trying to build a search engine they hope will someday rival their former employers.

The company, Neeva, was started in 2020 by Sridhar Ramaswamy, who ran Googles $162 billion advertising arm before stepping down in 2018, and Vivek Raghunathan, a former Google vice president who worked on monetizing YouTube and other parts of the company. For a few years, the startup, which has raised over $77 million from some of Silicon Valleys top investors, focused on differentiating itself from Google by shunning invasive advertising and allowing power users to pay for extra features.

Then, around the end of last year, the team at Neeva watched as a chatbot called ChatGPT created by the San Franciscobased startup OpenAI went viral. ChatGPTs ability to divine answers to nearly every question with an eerily humanlike sentience made it an instant hit, unleashing a modern AI wave. Suddenly, people around the world were talking about replacing Google search with ChatGPT. After all, if a chatbot could instantly answer any question for you, why would you need a search engine that simply spat out a bunch of links for you to trawl through?

For the team at Neeva, the popularity of ChatGPT was an aha moment, Ramaswamy told BuzzFeed News in an interview. Sure, OpenAIs bot did answer peoples questions, but that didnt mean it was a great search engine. It couldnt access the web, which meant that some of its answers were obsolete or completely made-up, and it didnt provide citations for where its answers came from. Neeva, Ramaswamy reckoned, could weave AI into its search engine and address ChatGPTs weaknesses.