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

Meilisearch, the creator behind the open supply search engine venture of the identical identify, in the present day closed a $15 million Sequence 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 develop Paris-based Meilisearch’s advertising and marketing and gross sales groups as the corporate transitions to an “enterprise-focused” technique.

“For 3 years, now we have created a product that brings a variety of worth to builders, which has allowed us to type a robust neighborhood,” Quelen stated by way of electronic mail. “The brand new cash is to give attention to the event of Meilisearch Cloud, our totally 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 buddies from school, in 2018. The trio labored collectively on search tech at e-commerce startup Veepee after which at Louis Vuitton, the place they rapidly realized the intractable downside that constructing a search engine introduced.

“Constructing nice search experiences has traditionally solely been potential for corporations with massive tech assets,” Quelen stated. “[Search is often] very arduous and costly for a crew to take care of and tune.”

In 2020, Quelen, Renault and Payet launched Meilisearch, a search API primarily based on their skilled learnings and experiences. Obtainable on GitHub, the venture 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 slim use instances 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 value and date, in addition to customizable rating guidelines. It additionally corrects for typos and errors, making certain errors in queries don’t adversely influence the search expertise.

Quelen claims that greater than 10,000 apps in the present day 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 rapidly 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 venture reveals an enormous adoption from the developer neighborhood and [we’re] actively engaged on monetization across the open supply venture.”

To that finish, as Quelen alluded to, Meilisearch is upping its funding in Meilisearch Cloud, which is scheduled to launch in late November. In improvement over the previous few months, Quelen says that Meilisearch Cloud — which affords 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 strategy to burn, spending the capital it raised from the Sequence A over the course of the following two to 3 years.

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