Note that despite the small number, Kagi is profitable (or at least they were as of a year ago):
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
Just been reading about them - they haven’t taken venture funding - so I expect they don’t have the same pressure to 10X every 6 months.
From their site:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
What "most people" (Arch Linux enthusiasts I presume) think about it has no influence on the contracts between Kagi and their investors, and the laws the parties have to abide to.
And how do you suppose that Kagi receives the money invested by their users? If you guessed by function of a VC firm, then you guessed right.
These are legal and contractual proceedings, with strict definitions of terms by law, not by popular opinion in the hacker community.
"Underlying motivations" of the investors is never a legal factor in any kind of investment deal. That's not something that can be accounted for by any kind of contract.
Because Kagi is not a publicly traded company, where anybody can invest.
They raised money in the form of SAFE notes, in which case a venture capital firm is created (you can also call it a legal entity or a juridical person) and each investor owns a part of that firm in proportion to the money they invest. That firm in turn will have a contract with the startup company which details and regulates how the invested funds in the future can be transformed to actual shares.
Thanks for the insight. But that's not how most people understand the term "VC money". So while you might be technically right, you are still (intentionally?) missing the point.
Venture funding is a financial and legal term with a defined meaning. Unfortunately the real world does not care whatever idea the hacker "community" has regarding what the words mean.
Actually the real world does care. Words have meanings in the context that they're spoken, and often times whether you want to or not, dictionaries have to update their meanings because they changed over time.
A dictionary has no bearing on the law and what is defined in a business contract. That would be like me claiming that I own a share of Apple Inc because I purchased an Apple in the supermarket. Sure, maybe I can get the entire HN comment section to agree with me, but that doesn't change reality.
I don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but the last line feels off. Investment profile needs to be matched with returns, but they don't all need to be 5 year mega exits, and they don't need the same companies to be racheted up in round after round of fund-led growth. This is why we don't build companies that will last 100+ years anymore
Why would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns.
You can do two, or even all three of those things. Human beings are not boolean greed machines.
The HN bubble likes to reduce everything to a numbers game. Real life isn't like that, as demonstrated by the many tens of thousands of companies that aren't run like a dystopian Silicon Valley comic book.
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Or the newer version:
> My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So in turn, every product becomes bloatware that needs more money to maintain and more users to get more money.
I don't know why they defaulted to placing it right next to my back button, but you inspired me to check and yes, one can right-click and either remove that dumb Sidebars button or hide it in the overflow menu
If you have the skills and the drive to successfully launch a good startup, then probably you won't be satisfied with keeping it a small time affair. Either you try to expand or you sell it and go make a new startup.
Businesses rarely remain stable, no matter if they're startups or not. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Either they shrink or they grow. You can call this the law of midrange businesses.
Consider a midrange hotel:
Either the owner cares about his business and continually improves the facilities and the experience for the guests. Soon the hotel will have a good reputation and will constantly be full. So the natural next step is for him to increase prices, because there is the demand and also he has higher operating costs. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is a high-end hotel.
Or the owner does not care about his business and continually lets things decay and become a worse experience for the guests. Maybe because he wants to save on operating and investment costs. Soon the hotel will have a bad reputation and the owner will decrease prices to attract guests, then further cut costs because cheaper guests don't demand much. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is now a low-end hotel.
And this happens in all businesses, because in the end they are run by people. If you'd love for companies to get profitable and remain small-ish, then you have to make such a company.
That's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.
Jira kicked ass. But it’s enterprise. Which means it is customizable beyond all rational thought.
If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good.
But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
Yea, it's so customizable, that every complaint about "Jira" is usually actually a complaint about how the person's organization has deliberately set up Jira. Jira workflows can be configured to be amazing, or they can be configured to be the ninth circle of hell.
The last time I used Jira, the CTO who decided he should be the project manager had made a ticket category named "Category".
He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid.
He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right").
I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults.
Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back…
Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it.
From their website:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
I'm assuming they're somewhere north of $5m ARR and that's not a tiny number, even at a thoroughly sane P/E value you're looking at $50m+ of company value.
I somehow doubt the usual approximations are working here.
Kagi probably have a user base of users who are highly attached to the product’s quality. Kagi could lose most of their paying customers should they ever fall into the wrong hands.
But I’m glad it’s like this. A good old company that just sell good products to their happy customers.
I assume that their weighted revenue per user is around $10 a month, with a discount for annual subscriptions, and they have 50k users.
Edit: And the insane values these days are P/E of 90+, bad businesses are less than 5, so I took a conservative estimate of 10 P/E, but I think a more reasonable number might actually be 40, putting them in the centimillion category for sure.
Looks like the assumption is $100 / year for each user, which with 50k users makes the $5 million ARR.
Then you have to pick a finger in the air multiplier for the value of the business. A stockmarket listed SaaS company that isn't over-inflated might be 10x the revenue, so that would be $50 million valuation.
Kagi is small, but it must still have good margins. So maybe really it is 5x revenue in value, depends on lots of things! Who selling to, and predictions for long term growth.
The small team is going to burnout soon. I checked there hiring description and it says something around the lines of expect a lot of work with little rest.
> Our ambition is enormous, going against industry giants with a very small team. You will work a lot. We are completely user funded. Kagi is currently used by one town worth of people. Do not expect VC backed/big-tech salary. Do expect equity as a part of compensation
It doesn’t sound good, but maybe they mean it in a more benign way, like, “We don’t have the funds to hire people who expect to twiddle their thumbs and get paid for it the way their over-funded VC peers do.”
In other words, maybe they’re saying they don’t have any BS jobs like Meta and Google seem to have.
the wierd part to to me is they expect you to spend 2 weeks on a take home coding assignment, then maybe if you pass, tell you the max they pay is 100k a year.
This could mean many different things. Like communicating well, documenting things to what you are probably assuming: answering your messages 24 hours a day instantly.
I doubt you can get a feeling for the work / life balance from this half sentence.
Search isn't that business since staying small means you won't be able to create a good index of the world. And you won't have enough resources for your browser.
Except Kagi often delivers better results than the modern, Ad, SEO and AI generated stuff that google delivers nowadays. And the most important selling point: You can block certain domains which vastly improves the results.
For me it is a great index, much better than all the alternatives. Especially against Google that is now filled with AI and Ads. Sometimes so bad, you really have to scroll down, to get to the first non-Ad link.
I haven't used Kagi much, but I don't think I've ever seen a single Pinterest result from any other search engine, I barely even know what the thing is for.
Maybe you just don't really search for images? Pinterest constantly comes up in image search results and then doesn't actually let you view or download the full image until you sign up.
And to be honest, I don't see as much Pintrest crap as I used to. It may just be that it has fallen out of favour because of its terrible design. But it was a site that basically let you create mood boards from images that you found as your browsed.
The big problem with it was that it simply copied the image so if you were looking for anything, Pintrest came up with the images for a product but then had removed all the source so it just flooded search results with uncited references and you couldn't find anything useful.
Reverse image searching to find sites thst sold a prpduct became useless.
Possibly a US thing, definitely not a Kagi thing. Useless Pintrest results (especially in image search) that don't actually the thing they pretend to are ubiquitous on Google.
Because it's expensive, and kagi still doesn't have one? And the browser is very incomplete? This is all pretty basic, how many global Web indices do you think exist?
I agree for the index, much less for the browser. I'm using Orion since a few months and beside some occasiona bugs I wouldn't ask anything more. If it was open source it would be perfect.
On the index side I agree, I think they are using other people indexes so far, I don't know if they are thinking about building one themselves.
Same for LLM, but I think that there the problem is even worse.
Huh? Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point, to the point that 50k people are willingly paying $10/mo extra for it.
Obviously they don't have the ancillary services (Maps etc), but for just searching, Kagi is far more likely to surface useful results instead of just the highest bidder. Compare a search like "us esta" for a clear demonstration.
>Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point
I'm not entirely sure what "objectively superior" is even supposed to mean in the context of a search engine, or how this follows from having 50k users, but that ceases to be an even remotely plausible statement if you've ever attempted to get good non-English search results.
Kagi gives great search results in other languages than English. You might have to select the right region first. Kagi and Google are the only search engines I have tried that gives decent results for other languages than English.
Huh indeed, you're talking about yet another argument, but just as wrong as the previous pivot:
First search result for "us esta" in Google is "https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta", same as in kagi, is that your objectivite fail at coming up with a simple metric?
Sure an ad blocker improves the experience somewhat. But I try to keep adversarial relationships out of my life. I don't understand why people want to normalize this.
Neither does Kagi, at least fully. Customizations help a bit until you need to search for something outside your usual focus areas. Anyone who claims to have created a search engine that truly surfaces the best links and ignores SEO is lying to you.
Might be location-dependent. I'm on a trip in Turkey, and the corretct link to US ESTA is the first result. However, if I switch to a VPN to my home, I get garbage for the first 5 results.
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi