Algolia Inc., the startup whose technology powers the search bars of sites such as Medium and Coursera, today announced that it has secured a $110 million funding round led by Accel with participation from Salesforce Ventures.

San Francisco-based Algolia sells a cloud-based search engine that companies can embed in their sites, cloud services and mobile apps via a programming  interface. Online retailers use the platform to help shoppers browse their product catalogs. Flexport Inc., which operates a freight management portal, relies on Algolia to make it easier for corporate supply chain teams to find data about merchandise shipments.

The startup has carved out a niche for itself by simplifying the process of building a customized search bar. There are other enterprise-focused search engines out there, most notably Elasticsearch, but tailoring them to a company’s specific needs can take a lot of work. Algolia provides pre-built features that allow developers to create customizations such as a sidebar quickly to let shoppers filter goods by price, or a widget showing the distance to a concert venue from the user’s home. 

“Organizations have had to choose between building resource-intensive search tools from scratch and using lower cost, but inflexible, set-it-and-forget-it search solutions,” said Algolia Chief Executive Officer Nicolas Dessaigne. “Algolia solves for both by removing the cost and complexity of building search.”

Globally, more than 8,000 organizations use the startup’s service to process 70 billion search queries every month. Algolia’s push for international growth has seen it establish offices in a half-dozen locations worldwide, including London and Tokyo. The startup plans to accelerate its expansion roadmap in the wake of the $110 million funding round, as well as hire more engineers to support product development.

Lately, Algolia has been working to expand its addressable market by enabling its search engine to be embedded in more kinds of applications. In the past few months the startup has added support for five major programming languages and frameworks.

Algolia has raised more than $180 million in funding to date.  

Photo: Algolia