Algolia has raised €1.2 Million from Alven Capital, Index Ventures & Point Nine Capital in an unprecedentedly large seed round of funding, in order to revolutionize database search for websites & apps. Founded by former Exalead veterans Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, the Paris-based startup already counts large apps like SocialCam amongst its clients, providing instant search that competes in accuracy and speed both on mobile and on the web.
“The response times are unbelievable. On average, queries over our 130M+ users database are answered in less than 40ms. That’s a staggering 25x faster response rate than our previous provider.” – Guillaume Luccisano, VP Engineering at Socialcam
Algolia’s Search API plugs into databases in just minutes, and instantly provide typo-tolerant search (no more auto-correct issues) as well as per-keystroke instant results. While the cost is based on search queries (similar to most API-based companies), Algolia has already seen to be less expensive & more efficient than it stakes a search engineer to configure technologies like Elastic Search.
“Algolia has brought a disruptive innovation to full text search in databases. It’s a highly skilled team that is on track to leave its mark on the market.” – Martin Mignot, Index Ventures
The service is just launching out of beta, though they are already showing off their service through demo’s such as that of Crunchbase – the search of the crunchbase data is faster, more accurate, and more beautiful than the actual Crunchbase site (though the demo is based off of data that is now a few months old).
Speaking about the fundraising earlier this week, CEO Nicolas Dessaigne spoke of the team’s experience pitching unsuccessfully at YC (one of Algolia’s competitors is a YC-backed company), though they spoke fondly of the experience, which ultimately led to them deciding to fundraise in Europe with international investors.
What’s interesting to note is that Algolia, a member of Paris accelerator TheFamily, was turned down from both Seedcamp & Y-Combinator, two accelerators which pride themselves on being able to attract the smartest & brightest talent. Yet, they seem to have missed out on what is shaping up to be France’s largest seed-funded company, and potentially one of the next generation of billions dollar tech companies.