Improving the Search Box: Our Investment in Algolia
We are thrilled to announce our investment and partnership with Algolia as part of its Series C round together with Accel.
Today we are thrilled to announce our investment and partnership with Algolia as part of its Series C round together with Accel. With more than 8,000 customers worldwide — including Stripe, Twitch, Slack, Intuit, Sephora, LVMH, and Birchbox — Algolia quickly has become one of the most exciting businesses emerging out of Europe. We’ve known co-founders Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine for a while now and are continuously impressed by their product leadership and vision. Our focus at Salesforce Ventures is backing the most ambitious SaaS companies strategic to the Salesforce ecosystem and our customers, and Algolia fits the bill as a true category leader.
A Future in API
These companies have figured out that businesses don’t need to reinvent the wheel when they build their tech stacks. By offering an outstanding developer experience, they enable organizations to better focus on their core competency.
We get excited when companies successfully drive such a bottom-up go-to-market motion and expand into larger accounts. With a strong and active developer community at its heart, Algolia is excitingly moving into enterprise ACVs with multi-year commitments and has built a world-class sales team led by CRO Jean-Louis Baffier, a sales leader with a track record from Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft.
Building Great Search is Hard
Creating a great search experience is one of the fundamental problems faced by any site online. It’s also one of the hardest to crack. Algolia understands that most companies’ core business does not involve building a search experience, but how impactful it can be when integrated with their products quickly.
Recognizing this, Nicolas and Julien quickly capitalized on an opportunity in a market that has just started to take off (online and mobile commerce) and built a product that is easy to implement and tailor to deliver engaging experiences to customers.
Driving Customer Success
At Salesforce Ventures, we see better search as integral to digital transformation and driving customer success. User experience and agility really matter. If you run an e-commerce business, Algolia ultimately helps you achieve significantly higher conversion by offering customers a best-in-class search experience.
You can see it when you take a stroll through the online offerings at Lacoste, a joint customer of both Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Algolia. Type a few keywords into the clothing company’s search bar and precise results spring up in real-time. The effect is delightful and drives sales.
Finding information is a seemingly simple problem that’s incredibly hard to fix; but if done right, its effects are clear. We’re glad to back such an incredible team and growth story and to enable our customers to offer an amazing search experience to their own customers.
Welcome, Algolia to Salesforce Ventures!
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