Algolia raised $150 million Series D funding round, at a post-money value of $2.25 trillion. The company's valuation has quadrupled in comparison to the Series C round that was completed in October 2019. Algolia now has a valuation of over $1 billion.It is most well-known for its search-as a service product. You can integrate real-time searches into your website or app using a developer-friendly interface. Algolia's search function is similar to Spotlight on a Mac. The results load instantly after each keystroke, and are displayed in just a few seconds.Over 10,000 customers are now part of the company, including big names like Stripe, Medium and Zendesk. The company currently handles more than 1.5 trillion searches per year. That's 1,500,000,000,000 if all you want is zeros.Today's round of funding was led by Lone Pine Capital. Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC and STEADFAST Capital Ventures were also part of the round. Glynn Capital, Twilio, Twilio, and STEADFAST Capital Ventures were also involved. Not only that, but some existing investors also participated in the round, including DAG, Owl Rock, Accel and Salesforce Ventures.Algolia claims that the company's annual recurring revenues have increased by 180% over the previous year, although they don't disclose revenue numbers.API-first is the future, a reality that has been reflected in Twilio and Stripe's growth as well as Algolia's success in the API economy. Our relentless focus on developers, with our PLG strategy, enabling them build search into their apps and websites, has been a key part of our success. Bernadette Nixon, Algolia CEO, stated in a statement. We are excited to solve our customers' problems with Algolia Recommend or Predict.Algolia is now offering real-time APIs in addition to the search API. Algolia Recommend allows you to provide real-time product recommendations for your e-commerce site. This is part of a strategy for diversifying the company's product offerings.The company now tries to predict whether visitors will purchase something. This information can be used by companies to dynamically refresh content, send push notifications, offer a special, and so on.The company was founded in France and has seen tremendous growth over the years. Algolia has grown to be a large enterprise-focused business with a solid foundation. Nicolas Dessaigne, the co-founder and CEO of Algolia, decided last year to take a non-operational position.The company has also hired quite a few top executives in the last 18 months, including Michelle Adams (chief Revenue Officer, formerly at Dropbox), Carlton Baab, (chief Financial Officer, formerly at Alfresco), Piyush Ptel (chief Business Development Officer, formerly at Capgemini), Jim Schattin, (chief Customer Officer, formerly with Alteryx), Jason McClelland, (chief Marketing officer), formerly from Salesforce and Adobe), and Bharat Guruprakash, (chief Product officer, formerly, formerly, of Twilio)You can see that there are many talented people in the company. This means Algolia is focusing on building a long-term business instead of building cool technology or optimizing for acquisitions. It wouldn't surprise me if there was an IPO.
