Former Google ads boss launches ‘Web3’ search startup with backing from Coinbase, top VCs
Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy
Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A top former Google executive wants to make searching the blockchain easier with his new startup.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led the internet giant’s ad business from 2013 to 2018, has started a new company called nxyz. The venture is officially launching Wednesday after attracting investment from several top investors, he told CNBC exclusively.
Armed with a rolodex of eminent Silicon Valley connections, Ramaswamy secured $40 million in funding in May to establish nxyz as a separate entity to Neeva, a privacy-focused search engine he also owns. The round was led by Paradigm, a prolific crypto and “Web3” dealmaker, while Coinbase, Sequoia and Greylock — where Ramaswamy is a partner — also invested. Ramaswamy will remain as Neeva’s CEO while he also leads nxyz.
Nxyz was conceived earlier this year by a team of engineers at Neeva, a search engine that doesn’t include any ads and blocks online tracking tools. Ramaswamy built Neeva in 2019 after leaving his role as senior vice president of Google’s $150 billion ad business a year earlier, which he says was over disillusionment with its relentless focus on maintaining growth at the expense of users.
In a March blogpost on Neeva’s website, nxyz is described as “an experiment bringing the same user-first ethos of Neeva search to web3.” Web3 loosely refers the idea of a more decentralized version of the internet powered by cryptocurrencies, nonfungible tokens and other technologies. It encourages placing ownership of data in the hands of users instead of Big Tech platforms, which use people’s personal information to target them with ads.
“To me, the big advancement with a blockchain is that it introduces this idea of decentralized computation, where you’re uploading a piece of code to a blockchain and the code is running there,” Ramaswamy said in a CNBC interview. “No one is in charge. It is decentralized storage that is owned by a collective. Plus, they also have utility in the form of a native token currency that has been designed to give incentive for the system.”
Nxyz trawls blockchains and associated applications for sought-after data on things like how much someone holds in their crypto wallet, or what NFTs they’re buying. It then streams this data to developers in real-time using tools called APIs. The platform currently supports the Ethereum, Polygon and Binance networks, and Ramaswamy says it’s looking to include more over time.
Unlike Neeva and Google — the “Web2” behemoth Neeva wants to disrupt — nxyz’s Web3 search software isn’t targeted at consumers. Rather, it wants to offer clean blockchain data to large crypto firms, kind of like how Bloomberg sells Wall Street institutions access to financial data and news with its terminals business. Ramaswamy named crypto custody firm BitGo as an early client it has partnered with.
Parsing data from the blockchain is a messy process, he explained. Smart contracts — programs that power crypto applications — can be assigned designated tasks. But once they’re out in the wild, knowing what functions they carry out in practice can be difficult. As an example, bugs in key smart contracts known as blockchain bridges have opened the industry up to mega hacks, with bridges from Binance and Axie Infinity maker Sky Mavis suffering nine-figure breaches. More insight into the performance of those tools could improve security.
“It’s one thing to write smart contracts that can do things. But you need to have a record of, what did they do? And how do I surface that?” Ramaswamy said. “It’s everything from, ‘What does your wallet contain?’ to, ‘If you’ve swapped a USDC token with ethereum, what was the exchange and when did that happen?'”
Nxyz’s launch comes as crypto investors reel from a deep pullback in token prices, with bitcoin, the world’s largest digital currency, down 70% from its all-time high. Among the main factors driving the current so-called “crypto winter” are higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve and an industry-wide liquidity crunch.
That has led to a tougher environment for crypto and blockchain-focused startups seeking to attract capital, with Pitchbook data showing VC investment in such firms dropped 37% to $4.4 billion in the third quarter from $7.6 billion the quarter prior. Of those that have successfully raised, several are seeing their valuations remain flat or fall. Nxyz declined to disclose its valuation.
Ramaswamy said the firm was lucky to raise funding when it did. Talks with investors began in mid-April and concluded by mid-May, around the same time so-called stablecoin terraUSD and its sister token luna started crashing. Asked about souring investor sentiment toward crypto, the entrepreneur said his firm was “well-funded to sit out the crypto winter,” adding it only needs around 20 employees. “I think it’ll be a very different trajectory” to Web3 and crypto companies that have run into financial troubles, he said. “We want to be very mindful of the current climate, build carefully, and make sure that we are also bringing in revenue early on.”
Nxyz’s team is currently split across Mountain View, Austin and New York.
While stock prices of crypto trading platforms like Coinbase have come down quite a bit, the infrastructure that powers “Web3” remains a hot target. Firms like ConsenSys, MoonPay and Ramp have raised sizable amounts of cash this year. “Web3 developers today lack fast, flexible, and reliable infrastructure to support their applications, which holds the industry back from widespread adoption,” said Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm. “Nxyz has a truly superlative team that has built the best data indexing infrastructure for Web3, and we at Paradigm are thrilled to support them.”
Still, Web3 has been a punching bag for some leaders in Silicon Valley, like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. A “general uneasiness” people have when it comes to Web3 is there’s no “common term and definition,” according to John Lee, blockchain lead at e-commerce firm Shopify.
“Every time somebody in the general public has a conversation with somebody in the industry, they get a different definition, they get a different explanation,” Lee said. “It’s confusing to people.”
Meanwhile, the space is rife with scams, including infamous “rug pulls” where fraudsters flee a bogus token project once they’ve pocketed enough cash. Ramaswamy concedes “there have been a lot of scams” in Web3. But he hopes more practical use cases like video games, concert tickets and remittances will eventually catch on.
As for whether Web3 can crack the dominance of digital giants like Google and Meta, Ramaswamy said “the dice is loaded against” upstarts like his. However, staff at Big Tech firms are increasingly quitting to join roles at crypto businesses. That includes Ramaswamy’s eldest son who, according to his father, recently joined a Web3 company.
Asked for a take on his former employer, Ramaswamy said he thinks the company became a victim of its own success. “I think Google is an incredibly successful company,” he said. “But its growth mindset, combined with a monopoly position, produces a bad outcome.”
“Let’s say there was only one toothpaste manufacturer for all of the U.K. They’d be like, yeah £1 is not enough. We’re going to chalk it up to £1.20,” he added. “Google’s sort of like that, where it goes, ‘Everybody uses us for searching, you can keep jacking up the price and it’s fine.’ I don’t think it’s people being evil” — a reference to “Don’t be evil,” Google’s corporate code of conduct — “I think it’s a system that demands growth at all costs.”
Google was not immediately available for comment by the time of publication. The company previously told The Telegraph newspaper that its ads “help business of all sizes grow and connect with new customers.”
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a press briefing on the company’s campus in Redmond, Washington, on May 20, 2024.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft is cutting a small percentage of jobs across departments, based on performance, the company confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
“At Microsoft we focus on high-performance talent,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to CNBC on Wednesday. “We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action.”
Business Insider reported on the plans late Tuesday.
The job cuts will affect less than 1% of employees, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named in order to discuss private information.
Microsoft had 228,000 employees at the end of June. While the company’s net income margin of nearly 38% is close to its highest since the early 2000s, Microsoft’s stock underperformed its peers last year, rising 12% while the Nasdaq gained 29%.
Microsoft’s latest cuts are slim compared to recent downsizing efforts.
In early 2023, the company laid off 10,000 employees and consolidated leases. In January 2024, three months after completing the $75.4 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft’s gaming unit shed 1,900 jobs to reduce overlap.
As 2025 begins, Microsoft faces a more tenuous relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, which the company has backed to the tune of over $13 billion. The partnership helped propel Microsoft’s market cap past $3 trillion last year.
Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the phrase “cooperation tension” while discussing the relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on a podcast released last month.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant, which draws on OpenAI technology, has yet to become pervasive in business. Analysts at UBS said in a note last month that they came away from Microsoft’s Ignite conference with the impression that Copilot rollouts “have been a bit slow/underwhelming.”
Microsoft is still touting its growth opportunities. Finance chief Amy Hood said in October that revenue growth from Microsoft’s Azure cloud will speed up in the first half of this year because of greater AI infrastructure capacity.
WATCH: Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion to build out AI this year
D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz said Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is “dead wrong” about quantum computing after comments from the head of the chip giant spooked Wall Street on Wednesday.
Huang was asked Tuesday about Nvidia’s strategy for quantum computing. He said Nvidia could make conventional chips that are needed alongside quantum computing chips, but that those computers would need 1 million times the number of quantum processing units, called qubits, that they currently have.
Getting “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years, Huang told analysts.
Huang’s remarks sent stocks in the nascent industry slumping, with D-Wave plunging 36% on Wednesday.
“The reason he’s wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today,” Baratz told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on “The Exchange.” Baratz said companies including Mastercard and Japan’s NTT Docomo “are using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations.”
“Not 30 years from now, not 20 years from now, not 15 years from now,” Baratz said. “But right now today.”
D-Wave’s revenue is still minimal. Sales in the latest quarter fell 27% to $1.9 million from $2.6 million a year earlier.
Quantum computing promises to solve problems that are difficult for current processors, such as decoding encryption, generating random numbers and large-scale simulations. Technologists have been working on it for decades, and companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM are pursuing it today, alongside researchers at startups and universities.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding a Project Digits computer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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D-Wave was among a number of companies that enjoyed a revival of interest from investors in December, when Google announced a breakthrough in its own research. Google said it had completed a 100 qubit chip, the second of six steps in its strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits.
D-Wave shares soared 178% in December after popping 185% the month prior. Quantum company Rigetti Computing, which plummeted 45% on Wednesday, quintupled in value last month. IonQ dropped 39% on Wednesday. The stock rose 14% in December following a 143% rally in November.
Baratz acknowledged that one approach to quantum computing, called gate-based, may be decades away. But he said uses an annealing approach, which can be deployed now.
While Huang’s “comments may not be totally off-base for gate model quantum computers, well, they are 100% off base for annealing quantum computers,” Baratz said.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Even after Wednesday’s slide, D-Wave shares are up about 600% in the last year, giving the company a market cap of $1.6 billion.
Quantum computing has also been boosted by investor interest in artificial intelligence, the technology that’s led to surging demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which use conventional transistors instead of qubits. Nvidia’s market cap has increased by 168% in the past year to $3.4 trillion.
Baratz said D-Wave systems can solve problems beyond the capabilities of the fastest Nvidia-equipped systems.
“l’ll be happy to meet with Jensen any time, any place, to help fill in these gaps for him,” Baratz said.
A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.
EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.
The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.
The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.
EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.
Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.
At the time, the Commission said that Meta’s bundling of Marketplace with Facebook could mean competitors are effectively “foreclosed” given the distribution reach of the platform. Facebook counts more than 3 billion users globally.
The Commission also said that Meta imposes “unfair trading conditions” on other online classified ads service providers who advertise on its platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. It added that these conditions allow Meta to use data generated from other advertisers to benefit Marketplace.
Meta appealed the ruling at the time, saying that it “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services.”
“While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised,” the company said Wednesday.
EBay touted its integration with Facebook Marketplace as a way for the e-commerce site to “increase exposure to our sellers’ listings, on and off eBay, as part of our strategy to engage buyers and deepen customer loyalty.”
Facebook in 2023 announced a similar partnership with Amazon that lets users browse and purchase products without leaving the app.
WATCH: Will AI stocks push higher in 2025? Nvidia investor shares his outlook
Additional reporting by CNBC’s Annie Palmer.
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