Yeah but their CEO can be fired, which would be who the VCs backed
EDIT: The fact that me, average joe, knows all about open ai and its CEO, and even some of its engineers, yet didn't know Kagi was doing anything with AI until your comment, tells me that Kagi is not any sort of competition, not as far as VCs are concerned, anyway.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html