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 $1B that I had literally never heard of it.
OK I had never heard Kagi before this and I didn't realize it was that kind of post so I was confused.
If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now? Like I imagine they have special deals with like cloudflare or whatever so that Google's spiders are allowed but spiders from random companies that got less than a million dollars spiders aren't allowed? Is it even legal to webcrawl anymore if you don't have a team of lobbyists stationed at DC and Brussels just constantly pleasuring every politician? Probably they would say you are doing cyberfraud or wirecrime or interstate proxyterror of some kind, whose rules are buried in a stack of hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations?
They aren't trying to replace Google, they are an alternative for privacy-minded individuals who use/rely on searching a lot and want a better experience than Google provides.
Google will have its lock in but there's a market share of people like me (and many others here on HN) which have been let down by the constant enshittification of Google's search and will pay for an alternative providing the experience we were used with Google some 10-15 years ago.
Kagi is being smart, they don't need to become a multi-billion company, it's a small team (last I've seen it was about 15 people), providing a good enough product to have paying customers. I've been using it since Nov/2022 and been pretty happy to pay the US$ 10/month for a better and more private search product.
> OK I had never heard Kagi before this and I didn't realize it was that kind of post so I was confused.
If it's a Google alternative, wouldn't it be difficult because I imagine Google has so much lock in by now?
You are absoluetly right. This is what this paragraph from the announcement addresses.
“Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi, we are running a marathon and not a sprint. Altering entrenched habits in the society, such as the reliance on personal data and even pieces of what makes us human as currency for essential online activities like search and browsing, is a gradual process that will take time.”
> Looking ahead, we are cognizant that when building Kagi, we are running a marathon and not a sprint.
They are specifically drawing attention to the fact that they are aiming to build a long term sustainable business, not grow quickly and exit. Thats likely to be important to their customers.
They needed some cash for investment, but didn't need to maximise investment to push for rapid growth.
> why is a company raising $670k such big news here
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
