101–110 of 367 posts
I'm not hating but why is a company raising $670k such big news here? Aren't there some companies constantly raising like hundreds or thousands of times that much money, one got sold for $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
So it's more what they're doing rather than how much they raised.
I'm not hating but why is a company raising $670k such big news here? Aren't there some companies constantly raising like hundreds or thousands of times that much money, one got sold for $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
because "news" is something that is "new" (in this case raising a tiny amount) as opposed to what everybody else is doing (raising 100x or 1000x that amount)?
there is of-course an availability and reporting bias (there are countless of small firms raising small amounts in various sectors) but kagi is reasonably known in this audience so the news is interesting
I'm not hating but why is a company raising $670k such big news here? Aren't there some companies constantly raising like hundreds or thousands of times that much money, one got sold for $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
Because people here like Kagi and crave for a google alternative. I've seen Krita reach HN's front page. Not "Krita 5 just released". Literally just sigifing Krita's existance.
If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now? Like I imagine they have special deals with like cloudflare or whatever so that Google's spiders are allowed but spiders from random companies that got less than a million dollars spiders aren't allowed? Is it even legal to webcrawl anymore if you don't have a team of lobbyists stationed at DC and Brussels just constantly pleasuring every politician? Probably they would say you are doing cyberfraud or wirecrime or interstate proxyterror of some kind, whose rules are buried in a stack of hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations?
Neeva - cofounded by an ex-Google exec also provided a paid search experience with similar features. They have since shut down and in their blog post pointed out that the issue they faced was not convincing people that they should pay for search but rather the fact that distribution of their service is difficult (i.e. being browser defaults, at work, on people's phones). What's Kagi doing differently to be able to su…
I didn't realise Neeva had shut down. I tried it for about a week, but stopped using it because it wasn't as snappy as Google. In fact, I always seem to return to Google from every other search engine I try because of its snappiness — decades of tuning seems to have paid off.
Neeva - cofounded by an ex-Google exec also provided a paid search experience with similar features. They have since shut down and in their blog post pointed out that the issue they faced was not convincing people that they should pay for search but rather the fact that distribution of their service is difficult (i.e. being browser defaults, at work, on people's phones). What's Kagi doing differently to be able to su…
I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670 million, and I was very sad. That’s “VCs gonna enshittify it in 3 years” money. But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission. Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
$670k investment is not "bootstrap money". It's literally the opposite of bootstrapping. What is the value in this attempted narrative? Is it the entrepreneur equivalent of "I don't work with big data, only 500 billion row sets but..."
"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…
Per TFA, this money was mostly raised from Kagi's existing customers. They aren't building a web crawler. Kagi is a search "client" (it is one way to build on a shoestring budget, alright), augmented by an in-house small-scale just-in-time crawler. > From here, we take your query and use it to aggregate data from multiple other sources, including but not limited to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia, and other internal data…
Especially when google continues to be worse off year after year. Just search for my damn keywords, like you did 10 years ago, especially when I have already put quotes around them because you Re useless!
Kagi has successfully raised $670K in a SAFE note investment round, marking our first external fundraise to date. This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users. That is a dense paragraph. 1) What is a "SAFE note"? Google tells me: A "Simple Agreement for Future Equity" note is a way that startups can raise capital. The SAFE note is a legally binding agree…
>Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid service which requires an account for the transaction. ref: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/faqs.html#why-doe... Eh... This is a tall order when competition is 'free'. Anyways, I wish them good luck as competition is inherently good.
To be clear, I don't think Kagi will be next google. But I do think they have a chance to survive if they don't ruthlessly over extend their scope.