Algolia Secures $110 Million In Series C Funding To Finance Global Expansion

Algolia, a hosted API-based search service, has raised $110 million in Series C funding led by existing investor Accel, with additional investments from Salesforce Ventures and several other companies.

The company, which announced the funding Tuesday, plans to use the investment to support growth, focusing on further global expansion across the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific. It also will support research and development to continue building out its platform, focusing on personalization, machine learning and voice search capabilities.

Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO-cofounder at Algolia, attributes the company's growth to part luck and part persistence.

Dessaigne and CTO Julien Lemonie cofounded Algolia in 2012. The two set out to make it easier to add search to a variety of services, initially on mobile as what Dessaigne calls a “pure software development kit.” They added software as a service to support a variety of websites.

“If we had not started on mobile, we probably wouldn’t have designed the product for SaaS,” Dessaigne said.

The company now estimates that it supports more than 8,000 businesses -- up from 3,000 in 2017 -- such as Stripe, Slack, Discovery, Medium, LVMH, Lacoste, Zendesk and Birchbox.

These companies rely on Algolia to manage 70 billion search queries monthly. 

In June, Algolia announced a deal with Microsoft to makes its search-as-a-service product available on the cloud platform Azure.

Algolia hosts a few customers on the Azure cloud, including voice. “In the future we will see a lot more conversations in search,” he said.

Prior to this round, Algolia raised about $74 million. Accel, Point Nine Capital, Storm Ventures, Y Combinator, and 500 Startups were among the previous investors.

Financial backing from Salesforce is significant. Salesforce does not have previous ties with a search company.

The integration between Salesforce and Algolia will come in time, Dessaigne said. The investment creates a new partnership to add the technology into some of their products and offerings.

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