
Algolia (YC W14) raises a $18.3M Series A - redox_
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/20/algolia-grabs-18-3-million-from-accel-for-its-search-api-on-steroids
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pbiggar
I'd love some insight from the Algolia folks on what metrics it took to put
this massive round together (esp considering the 2nd seed). Obviously, it
means that you had middling numbers for the 2nd seed that you've managed to
turn into fairly substantial growth (congratulations!).

$2m ARR with 25% MoM growth?

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ndessaigne
Thanks! Pretty good guess, you're close :)

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pbiggar
:)

Can you give more specifics, esp around the monthly growth. The difference
between 20% and 30% is pretty massive there!

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ndessaigne
30% on average in 2014, lower today. Sorry we don't disclose specifics (at
least for now). Happy to share experience offline however.

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pbiggar
No worries. Those are fantastic numbers, congrats!

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ameyamk
Algolia is mind blowing. We are replacing mysql backend with algolia and its
bringing down latencies from 300-400 ms down to 10-20 ms. Things like out of
the box multi location support and full text search etc makes algolia
compelling choice.

All this at $49/ month is actually a good deal!

I wish them well.

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MagicWishMonkey
Did you try Solr or ElasticSearch before deciding to go with Algolia?
Comparing them to MySQL is a bit of an apples/orange comparison, I would like
to know how they compare to other search platforms.

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ameyamk
Well. Setting up your own Solr/ elastic search would cost lot more than $49.
Here you have a benefit of having platform as a service too

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jakozaur
Congratulations!

"Originally from France, the company is now headquartered in San Francisco."

Hmm, is it really advantage to move engineering to Bay Area from France. On
LinkedIn it looks they have more than half of company employees are in Paris.
Given large cost of living in Bay Area and how hard is to hire engineers
there, it may make sense to grow their Paris office.

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jedisct1
Good luck raising funds in France :(

Docker also moved from France to San Francisco and if they hadn't done so,
they would be dead by now.

Congrats to Algolia. They have a killer product, backed by a really talented
team.

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jacquesm
The 'dailymotion' story certainly didn't help the French tech scene.

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leeleelee
I've never had a problem implementing realtime search. Can somebody give me an
example use case where algolia is a better solution than doing it yourself?

Clearly it's a popular, in-demand service -- I'm genuinely curious as to the
types of apps/websites this is best suited for.

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awad
Companies that don't employ people as talented as you probably are. There are
lots of them, and they have plenty of dollars to spend on services that
fulfill their needs. Often, technology is not the core strength of these
companies.

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hamhamed
I really want to use Algolia, but their pricing model just sucks. What's the
point of a 14 day trial? If I'm going to spend a couple days hacking something
using Algolia, I wouldn't want it to end in 14 days. And it's extremely
expensive..$49 a month for the starter package? No thanks.

Their free plan can only store 1000 rows..that's really small. What they
should do is at least 100k row for free (I'd even go to 1 million), but charge
me the moment i surpass X amount of requests. That way I would be comfortable
using Algolia from day 1 of my startup and stick with them forever.

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pbiggar
If you're building a startup, you should consider $49/mo to be a trivial
expense and just pay it. I'm aware that you'll need to use dozens of services
and the cost may well achieve $1000/mo, even in the early days. Doesn't
matter, just pay it.

Startups are about growth. Paying for SaaS allows you to focus on your product
and to grow much more quickly and aggressively than you would otherwise. It's
silly and wasteful to even think about not spending $49/mo for the kind of
leverage you'd get from Algolia.

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teacup50
As someone who bootstrapped a "startup", there are plenty -- PLENTY -- of non-
SaaS solutions that:

1) are perpetually licensed. You don't have to worry that they'll disappear on
you, or jack up their prices.

2) are cheaper. far, far cheaper.

3) are just as effective.

4) enable growth by:

4a) Being extensible (server-side code execution enables a _lot_ ).

4b) Being economical (SaaS chews up a runway like nobody's business).

4c) Building valuable (in the business agility sense) internal expertise.

5) don't incur the overhead of managing accounts for people across a different
provider for every service. If you're growing fast, having a single account
switch to flip makes a real difference to new-hire integration overhead and
effectiveness.

Hard dependencies on costly software subscriptions is rarely a net win for a
startup.

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briandear
$49 per month is 'costly'? That's barely 1/2 an hour of developer time. That's
an absolute bargain. If it took a developer 6 hours to build an in house
solution, that just cost as much as a year of Algolia. And that dev time
doesn't even include the servers or maintenance costs. $49 is nothing. It
would actually be irresponsible to not spend that amount because you'd be
focusing reasorces wastefully by building something you needn't build. It's
like people who hire a Dev Ops guy when Heroku would cost them $2000 per
month; instead they'll pay AWS $1500 and then a full time salary to manage it.
Or, to put it into perspective; $49 per month is probably hundreds less than a
typical ping-ping startup spends on microbrews for the beer fridge.

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teacup50
An in-house solution and the resulting acquired expertise may provide a great
deal more inherent value.

And what's irresponsible is using software (languages, architecture,
deployment methods) so inefficient that you need to spend $2000/mo to host a
minimal deployment.

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shah_s
Congrats. I checked out Algolia a while back, and its great to see such
progress. I wonder if Algolia and Swiftype will merge because they both offer
great products.

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oimaz
how are algolia and swiftype different?

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csbrooks
I love Algolia. Used it as a core part of a project I worked on. Very slick.

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based2
by the creators of exalead

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dang
... and HN Search!

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arnaudcb
Great folks, great technology. Well done Nicolas, Julien and team!

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naiv
fantastic ui.

we barely use elasticsearch for searches but for statistics and data
analytics, will these features also be added?

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ndessaigne
We already provide analytics about the searches performed on your indices.
However, we focus on user-facing search use-cases. We don't recommend using
Algolia for processing your logs for example. See this quora answer for an
Elasticsearch / Algolia comparison: [http://www.quora.com/How-does-
Elasticsearch-relate-and-or-co...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-
Elasticsearch-relate-and-or-compare-to-Algolias-Search-as-a-Service)

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sylvinus
Congrats to the team!

