Algolia

Algolia is a French proprietary search-as-a-service platform, with its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Paris and London. Its main product is a web search platform for individual websites.

Company
Algolia was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both originally from Paris, France. It was originally a company focused on offline search on mobile phones. Later it was selected to be part of Y Combinator's Winter 2014 class.

Starting with two data centres in Europe and the US, Algolia opened a third center in Singapore in March 2014, and as of 2019, claimed to be present in over 70 data centers across 16 worldwide regions. It serves roughly 11,000+ customers, handling 60 billion user queries per month. In May 2015, Algolia received $18.3M in a series A investment from a financial group led by Accel Partners, and in 2017 a $53M series B investment, also led by Accel Partners. From June 2016 to September 2019, the usage of Algolia by small websites increased from 632 to 5,168 in the "top 1 million websites" and 197 in the "top 10k websites" evaluated by Built With.

In January 2021, Algolia acquired Romanian AI and machine learning startup Morph.

In July 2021, Algolia raised a $150 million Series D funding round and became a unicorn, with a valuation of $2.25 billion.

Products and technology
The Algolia model provides search as a service, offering web search across a client's website using an externally hosted search engine. Although in-site search has long been available from general web search providers such as Google, this is typically done as a subset of general web searching. Algolia's product only indexes their clients' sites. Data for the client site is pushed from the client to Algolia via a RESTful JSON API, then the search box is added to the client's web pages.

API
Algolia provides their search service via various APIs. The Rest API provides basic features of search, analysis and monitoring. There are 10 supported languages and platforms for client usage.

Infrastructure
Algolia documented one attempt to remove all single points of failure in their architecture and proposed a worldwide infrastructure called Distributed Search Network to reply to a search query from any location closer to the source.

The DSN feature allows setting the locations in Algolia's network where the data should be duplicated.