Founded by the guy who used to to head up Google Ads engineering (Sridhar Ramaswamy).

I know some might jump to conclusions just from that, but this EconTalk appearance by Ramaswamy goes into his motivations. He sounded like he had soured on the entire free-with-Ads model.

https://www.econtalk.org/sridhar-ramaswamy-on-google-search-...