Algolia

Algolia provides a hosted search API and AI search and discovery tools that developers embed in websites and apps, with heavy use in ecommerce and media. It was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both from Paris, went through Y Combinator and the French accelerator TheFamily, and moved its headquarters to San Francisco. The company says it serves more than 18,000 brands and powers over 1.75 trillion searches a year, with about 800 employees; early customers included Slack, Stripe, Medium, Twitch and DigitalOcean.

Early backers included 500 Startups, Alven Capital, Index Ventures and Point Nine Capital. In June 2014 Storm Ventures led a $1.2 million seed extension that brought total funding to $2.8 million, and Christoph Janz of Point Nine joined the board. In May 2015 Accel led an $18.3 million Series A. Accel led again in June 2017 with a $53 million Series B, joined by Jason Lemkin's SaaStr Fund and existing investors Alven, Point Nine and Storm Ventures, when Algolia had 3,000 customers. In October 2019 Accel led a $110 million Series C with Salesforce Ventures, Alven, DAG Ventures, Founders Circle, Owl Rock Capital, SaaStr Fund and World Innovation Lab, bringing the total to $184 million. In July 2021 Lone Pine Capital led a $150 million Series D at a $2.25 billion post money valuation, with Fidelity, Steadfast Capital Ventures, Glynn Capital and Twilio joining.

Algolia remains private. Dessaigne handed the CEO role to Bernadette Nixon, the former Alfresco chief executive, in May 2020 and stayed on the board. The company reported annual recurring revenue growth of 180 percent year over year at the time of the Series D, when it had more than 10,000 customers. It has made small technology acquisitions, including the Romanian machine learning startup Morphl in January 2021 and the Australian search company Search.io in September 2022. No later priced primary round has been disclosed.

Algolia is an example of a European technical founding team using a US accelerator and a single anchor investor to scale. Accel led three consecutive rounds from 2015 to 2019, and its valuation more than quadrupled between the 2019 Series C and the 2021 Series D. For the 2014 seed investors, the path from first check to unicorn took about seven years, but no liquidity event has been announced since, so returns for backers remain on paper.