Algolia, the fast-growing French startup which provides a hosted search API, has raised $53 million in Series B funding round led by Accel. New investors, including Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr fund, Jyoti Bansal (founder of AppDynamics), Clark Valberg (CEO of InVision) and Des Traynor (co-founder & CSO of Intercom) participated in the round as well as existing investors Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital and Storm Ventures.
Founded in 2012, Algolia provides a hosted search API that allows businesses, whether ecommerce stores, media sites or SaaS products, to build a search engine for their app or website, delivering highly relevant results at a very fast speed. Algolia has over 3,000 customers in 100 countries, with offices in San Francisco, Paris, New York City and Atlanta.
While web search engines have made it intuitive and easy to find any website, store or service, websites and apps rarely provide that same experience. The top tech companies all have advanced proprietary search technology – voice, text or otherwise – which delivers a seamless and high quality experience that users have come to expect. Up until now, replicating the same experience in an ecommerce store, on a news app or in a CRM has been unattainable. Algolia provides businesses with the infrastructure, engine and tools they need to easily create fast, relevant consumer-grade search for their users.
Algolia’s hosted search engine has already handled 1 trillion API calls, currently delivering 25 billion searches each month across 8,000 websites and mobile apps. The young company is growing its annual recurring revenue (ARR) more than 100% each year. With a product able to adapt and scale to startups and large enterprises, current Algolia customers include Periscope (Twitter), Twitch.tv (Amazon), Medium, Quiksilver and Fanatics.
Nate Niparko, a Partner who led the investment from Accel, stated: “Developers are increasingly turning to Algolia to create great experiences for their users. Algolia has invested years of research in building their world-class search product, and their customers can leverage this experience to give end-users the same fast, flexible, reliable search that they’d expect from one of the big web platforms. Just as we’ve seen with Braintree, Segment, or Checkr making complex tasks simple for developers in their respective fields, Algolia has become the go-to option for search.”
With its latest fundraising round, Algolia will continue to invest in bringing more search innovations to every app and website. Existing innovations include:
- Algolia Offline: reliable mobile search in low- or no-connectivity areas.
- Algolia Places: easy-to-integrate address search for lightning-fast checkout and address lookup.
- Distributed Search Network: the first worldwide search network that brings lightning-fast search results to your users wherever they are.
Just as SaaS changed the way businesses use software, SaaS APIs like Algolia are aiming to change the way businesses build software. With APIs, businesses can leverage infrastructure (cloud hosting), manage communications (email, text messages and VOIP) and build mission-critical features like payments and authentication/logging-in. Algolia is using its continuous API innovations not only to provide customers with consumer-grade search, but to redefine search altogether.