UPDATED 17:33 EDT / JUNE 08 2017

INFRA

Algolia raises $53 million for its search as a service platform

Algolia Inc., which powers search features for major websites such as Periscope, Twitch and Medium, today announced it has raised $53 million to keep expanding its platform.

The Series B funding round for the search startup was led by Accel Partners, which also led Algolia’s $18 million Series A funding round in 2015. The new round also included investments from Alven Capital, Clark Valberg, Des Traynor, Jyoti Bansal, Point Nine Capital, SaaStr Fund and Storm Ventures. Algolia’s latest round brings its total funding to date to nearly $75 million.

Founded in France in 2012, Algolia makes it easy for businesses to add a search box to their websites or apps without having to build their own solution from scratch. A company simply needs to feed its search data to Algolia, customize how it wants results to be organized, and then add some code to its site to access Algolia’s search application programming interface, or API.

Algolia designed and built its own search engine, which is hosted on open-source NGINX web servers. It search started out as a mobile software development kit before it was later turned into an online API. According to Algolia, this transition made its search incredibly fast because it was already optimized for the limited hardware available to mobile devices.

Algolia has launched several new search products in the last few months, including in April, when the company introduced Algolia Vault, a secure search solution for organizations that must meet certain compliance standards for privacy, such as health care or government organizations. Algolia Vault keeps data secure by using encryption-at-rest, which keeps information encrypted even when it is not being accessed through search.

Earlier this year, Algolia also launched Algolia Offline, which is designed to allow mobile users to continue searching even when they do not have a stable network connection. The service does this by embedding the entire Algolia search engine in a mobile app, which the company said was a “return to its roots” from when it had been an offline SDK.

In a blog post announcing the funding, Algolia co-founder and Chief Executive Nicolas Dessaigne said that the company will continue to innovate with new features and products.

“We will continue to make investments in leveraging the advantages of being a hosted API to deliver innovations in search, not only making it possible to have consumer-grade search previously reserved only for the titans of tech – Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google – but also by bringing search innovations to the public that will redefine search itself,” Dessaigne said.

On its website, Algolia says its service is used for more than 20 billion searches each month, and the company now has more than 3,000 customers. It will use its new funding to continue developing its platform, and it will also open a new office in London.

Image: Algolia

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