Meilisearch lands $15M funding to develop its ‘search-as-a-service’ enterprise • TechCrunch

Meilisearch, the creator behind the open supply search engine undertaking of the identical identify, at the moment closed a $15 million Collection A spherical led by Felicis, with participation from CRV, LocalGlobe, ESOP, Mango Capital, Seedcamp and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. CEO Quentin de Quelen tells TechCrunch that the brand new money will assist to broaden Paris-based Meilisearch’s advertising and marketing and gross sales groups as the corporate transitions to an “enterprise-focused” technique.

“For 3 years, we now have created a product that brings quite a lot of worth to builders, which has allowed us to kind a robust group,” Quelen stated through e-mail. “The brand new cash is to give attention to the event of Meilisearch Cloud, our absolutely managed providing of Meilisearch cases. We can even proceed to put money into our open supply providing by releasing an ‘enterprise-ready’ model of Meilisearch by the start of 2023.”

Quelen co-founded Meilisearch alongside Clément Renault and Thomas Payet, two mates from faculty, in 2018. The trio labored collectively on search tech at e-commerce startup Veepee after which at Louis Vuitton, the place they shortly realized the intractable downside that constructing a search engine offered.

“Constructing nice search experiences has traditionally solely been doable for corporations with massive tech assets,” Quelen stated. “[Search is often] very arduous and costly for a group to keep up and tune.”

In 2020, Quelen, Renault and Payet launched Meilisearch, a search API based mostly on their skilled learnings and experiences. Obtainable on GitHub, the undertaking grew to over 10 million downloads, making it among the many hottest open supply search initiatives.

Quelen asserts that, in contrast to Elasticsearch, and different freely out there search engine frameworks, Meilisearch is designed for frontend purposes throughout a broad swath of domains — not simply slender use circumstances like e-commerce discovery. Leveraging pure language processing, Meilisearch makes an attempt to achieve a greater understanding of the queries that customers make on no matter app, service or web site a developer builds it into.

Meilisearch helps main languages and ships with search filters, like worth and date, in addition to customizable rating guidelines. It additionally corrects for typos and errors, guaranteeing errors in queries don’t adversely impression the search expertise.

Quelen claims that greater than 10,000 apps at the moment depend on Meilisearch. That’s spectacular when contemplating the rising competitors within the “search-as-a-service” house, which incorporates CommandBar, Algolia and Chameleon.

“[W]e shortly proved that Meilisearch was long-awaited by builders who couldn’t discover easy and highly effective options to enhance the search expertise of their purposes,” he stated. “The open supply undertaking exhibits an enormous adoption from the developer group and [we’re] actively engaged on monetization across the open supply undertaking.”

To that finish, as Quelen alluded to, Meilisearch is upping its funding in Meilisearch Cloud, which is scheduled to launch in late November. In growth over the previous few months, Quelen says that Meilisearch Cloud — which gives the identical expertise because the open supply Meilisearch however hosted on the general public cloud, with prebuilt integrations — onboarded over 50 corporations throughout a non-public beta.

When requested about runway and income, Quelen declined to remark. However he stated that Meilisearch will take a disciplined method to burn, spending the capital it raised from the Collection A over the course of the subsequent two to 3 years.

Up to now, Meilisearch has raised $22 million. It plans to broaden its 25-person headcount to 30 by the tip of the yr and 50 by year-end 2023.