Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy is a cofounder and CEO of Neeva, an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine founded in 2019. Prior to founding Neeva, Ramaswamy oversaw Google's advertising products, including search, display, video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He joined Google in 2003 and was part of the growth of AdWords and Google's overall advertising business.

For fifteen years, Sridhar Ramaswamy built and ran Google's advertising division, which made around $115 billion in revenue before he left in 2018. During his time there, he worked to develop Google's advertising products before, as noted by him, he grew disillusioned that Google's growth was affecting search quality and consumer privacy, among other concerns. In 2018, Ramaswamy joined venture capital firm Greylock as a venture partner, before he would go on to found Neeva.

According to Ramaswamy, Neeva was founded to compete with Google's search business, and following the example of what Netflix did to ad-supported television, he founded Neeva to use a subscription-based model to grow revenue without relying on ads or selling users' information.

Ramaswamy was born in and grew up in India, where he attended the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to earn a Bachelor's degree in computer science. Following this, he moved to the United States to enter Brown University, where he earned his Masters of Science and Ph.D. in computer science. Following his graduation in 1995, he held research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research before working as a director of engineering for Epiphany, a marketing software company. Ramaswamy has published numerous papers on database systems and theory and also holds patents in the area. He has been a board member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Palo Alto Networks, and Gretel.ai.