Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kagi raises $670k

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 367 posts

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#231

Post by tailspin2019 »

Animats wrote: post #6

"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…

> But not for $670K.

As someone who has already replaced Google with Kagi, as far as I'm concerned they've already done it.

I've never paid Google for anything (apart from with my data) but I've been paying Kagi for almost a year now. The model is different. From what I've seen so far, it's better.

The amount of money you burn through is not a good indicator of whether you'll end up with a good product or viable business at the end, IMHO

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#232

Post by api »

alberth wrote: post #229

I find it interesting that Google is generating $6.70/user/month for their free search, while Kagi lowest paid tier is $5.00. Google is generating more revenue per "free" user than Kagi lowest paid plan. Goes to show just how much money there is in advertising. https://www.statista.com/statistics/306570/google-annualized...

That actually makes great sense. Kagi is not using advertising so you have to pay for it directly. That may be about what a decent search costs.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#235

Post by unshavedyak »

grantcarthew wrote: post #38
Animats wrote: post #6

"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…

I've been using Kagi since I could first get onto the product. As soon as it came out of Beta, I subscribed. I had no idea how intrusive Google was. I love Google services. Google Cloud is far better than the others. That said, the search is just poison. I now spend time looking at results, not searching for results. I have to admit though, ChatGPT did make me consider dropping the subscription. Mr Chat has weakened…

As a subscriber to both ChatGPT and Kagi, agreed. You may be interested to know that Kagi also has https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt. It's been pretty good in my tests so far, nothing magical just fast and similar to a search input field.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#236

Post by berkle4455 »

NikxDa wrote: post #230

Looks like they significantly missed their goal. From Kagi's investment round invitation email: - SAFE note round with a valuation cap of $40MM (pre-money) - 249 investors maximum - We are looking to raise around $2MM from our users in this way ($5MM max) - Minimum investment amount per investor is $5,000, and maximum is $500,000. So the $670k they now raised are only about a third of what they were aiming for.

Their revenue in September was $318k/yr, what is it today? Let’s say it’s $600k? $1M? $40M is a really high valuation for that revenue, I’d not have invested either. It’s not 2021 anymore.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#237

Post by joshstrange »

Can someone help me a little? I tried Kagi and when my 100 searches ran out I stopped using it. I really didn't like the feeling that I needed to meter my searches, it added a barrier to every search I did (should I use Kagi for this or should I just use Google?). It sounds stupid but literally every search I did I had a pang of worry that I was "wasting" a search.

I also didn't experience a huge increase in search quality that I noticed. I didn't really get into the Lenses stuff even though it seemed cool because I just don't think about things like that when I'm searching. I guess 25 years of googling has conditioned my way of thinking about search.

Kagi feels like something I should really like and I'd be fine with paying for it but I guess I need some more "tips" about how to get the most out of it and/or how to change my way of thinking about this.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#238

Post by asah »

Is classic search relevant? Within a year, I expect Google to replace search with an LLM that delivers answers and references to the source material vs making users click through.

ChatGPT is the opposite of teenage sex: everybody is doing it, but nobody is admitting to it.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#239

Post by nvr219 »

joshstrange wrote: post #237

Can someone help me a little? I tried Kagi and when my 100 searches ran out I stopped using it. I really didn't like the feeling that I needed to meter my searches, it added a barrier to every search I did (should I use Kagi for this or should I just use Google?). It sounds stupid but literally every search I did I had a pang of worry that I was "wasting" a search. I also didn't experience a huge increase in search q…

I really enjoyed Kagi but it wasn't worth paying $25/mo for unlimited, and like you I don't want to be thinking about metering my searches.

Re: Kagi raises $670k

#240

Post by dns_snek »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #180
dns_snek wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed? Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries. Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search result…

> Define success? Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue than their cost, and paying all employees market rate salary(including the founder himself).

> Its not hard to define success.

Everyone has their own definition of success. For many, a "successful" tech startup is one that eventually lands a $100M+ buyout, or gets millions of paying customers, or some other metric that's far beyond "simply" arriving at a sustainable business that you (and I) mentioned.

Post reply on HN