Point Nine Invests in French Search API Platform Algolia

By David Knight |

Berlin-based Point Nine Capital is one of three VC firms taking part in a $1.5 million (€1.11m) investment round in Algolia. The French software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup says it wants to take search to a new level, with Index Ventures and Alven Capital, as well as business angels Ilan Abehassera (founder of Producteev) and Thibaud Elzière (founder of Fotolia), also participating in the round.

Algolia produces a SaaS search API for developers looking for a “turnkey solution to deliver real-time, typo-tolerant and location-aware search in their applications and websites”, the company said.

Based in Paris, Algolia was founded in October 2012 by search experts including its CEO Nicolas Dessaigne and CTO Julien Lemoine, who bother formerly worked at semantic search company Exalead. It currently runs more than four million queries a day, mostly in the USA and Europe.

Martin Mignot of Index Ventures, which can count Skype, MySQL, Dropbox and Path amongst ints past investments, said: “Algolia has brought a disruptive innovation to full text search in databases. It’s a highly skilled team that is on track to leave its mark on the market.”

The platform aims to help website and app developers provide a better search experience for their users. It was designed with mobile in mind and claims to have dropped the “obscure statistical approach” for a way to “decide on the fly which factors will come into play when returning results.”

It’s the third investment in quick succession for Point Nine, which last week added Typeform and 15Five to its portfolio.