Algolia is a French software-as-a-service startup seeking to improve the search experience for everyone building websites and apps.
While search engine Google has raised the bar for quality online search, Algolia’s CEO and co-founder Nicolas Dessaigne recognized that recreating that kind of experience was impossible for most app and website developers, who lacked the same resources, data and scale as the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant.
Customers that use Algolia’s search management service including Medium, Crunchbase, DigitalOcean, Amazon-owned Twitch, Stripe, and Twitter-owned Periscope, among more than 3,000 others that use its hosted search API.
The company says it handles “billions of queries for thousands of websites and mobile applications every month, delivering relevant results in an as-you-type search experience in under 50ms anywhere in the world.”
Its full-stack solution seeks to take the frustration out of building search, as the company maintains the infrastructure and the engine, along with extensive documentations to dozens of up-to-date API clients and SDKs with the latest search features.
Recently, Algolia launched a fallback version of its platform called Algolia Offline that one can use in airplane mode or without a strong signal.
In June, 2017, the company raised $53 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel, a couple years after inking $18.3 million in another round led by the same venture capital firm. The six-year-old company indicated that its most recent funding was to be used to open up new offices in London, after Paris, San Francisco, New York City and Atlanta.
Algolia’s biggest advantage is that its search technology can be customized for particular sites. So while Algolia heads off against some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, its CEO says its ability to offer more flexibility than that of its competitors provides it with a major advantage.
