Algolia is a search-and-discovery API company founded in 2012 in Paris by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, later going through Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch and relocating its headquarters to San Francisco while keeping engineering offices in Paris and London.
The platform gives developers a hosted search engine combining keyword and vector search, built around the instant, type-ahead results popularized by early Algolia customers, and has since layered in AI features like Query Categorization, AI Ranking, and Advanced Personalization on top of the core index-and-query API. Algolia reports handling more than 1.75 trillion queries a year for over 18,000 businesses, and a 2026 Forrester study commissioned by the company found a 213% three-year ROI for adopters.
Algolia is built for engineering teams adding search or product discovery to a website, app, or e-commerce storefront, from solo developers to large enterprises. The Build plan is free (1 million records, 10,000 search requests a month); Grow and Grow Plus bill by usage past those limits ($0.50 and $1.75 per additional 1,000 requests respectively), and Elevate requires an annual contract with custom, sales-negotiated pricing.
