INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Algolia, one of the group of startups that provides search as a service for websites and apps as an alternative to Google and other search
engines, is announcing a major round of funding today to fuel its growth
C of $110 million, money it plans to invest in R-D around its search technology, including doubling down on voice, and further global
expansion in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.This Series C is being led by Accel, with other investors in this round including
Salesforce Ventures (along with others that are not being named).The funding is coming at a time of strong growth for Algolia, whose basic
in France, Algolia is now based out of San Francisco and has been in Asia since 2014, most recently doubling down on business in Japan, and
when it last raised money in June 2017, it had only 3,000 customers.Algolia had raised $74 million prior to this, with previous investors
including Accel, Point Nine Capital, Storm Ventures, Y Combinator, 500 Startups and a number of individuals, among others.While Algolia is
not disclosing its valuation, the prospects for building a big, enterprise-focused search business are there
As a point of comparison, consider the enterprise search company Elastic, which went public in 2018 and now has a market cap of some $6.7
billion after being valued at a mere $700 million when it was still private
websites and millions of apps on the market today.Having Salesforce as a strategic backer in this round is notable, as the CRM giant
currently does not have a native search product in its wide range of cloud-based services for enterprises, instead opting for endorsed
integrations with third parties, such as Algolia competitor Coveo
effort to provide a counterbalance against the power of Google in search continues apace, this essentially gives Salesforce a financial
foothold in one of the faster-growing companies in the space.As my colleague Romain has previously noted in his coverage of Algolia, the
or app easily by way of an API.This in contrast to solutions that either are built in-house from the ground up, or rely on more lengthy and
more expensive integrations to get up and running
Alongside that, Algolia has more recently released supplementary tools, such as search analytics and A/B testing to help optimise results
and understand better what it is that site/app visitors want to know.The funding comes at an interesting time in the world of search
entry is Google.com, and while you can tailor your results based on your search terms, the selling point is that you can search for anything
Awareness of issues such as privacy and data protection have turned some off from the idea of open-ended browsing powered by advertising,
and as we and the internet itself has gotten more sophisticated, sometimes the open-ended search feels too wide for our purposes, and web
This is the context that has given rise to Algolia and others like it (for example Lucidworks raised $100 million in August).The landscape
drives improved business results
