Meilisearch, the creator behind the open source search engine project of the same name, today closed a $15 million Series A round led by Felicis with participation from CRV, LocalGlobe, ESOP, Mango Capital, Seedcamp and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. CEO Quentin de Quelen told TechCrunch that the new cash will help expand Paris-based Mailsearch’s marketing and sales teams as the company shifts to an “enterprise-oriented” strategy.
“For nearly three years, we’ve created a product that brings a lot of value to developers, which has allowed us to build a strong community,” Quellen said in an email. The new funding will focus on the development of Mailsearch Cloud, a fully managed Mailsearch instance offering. We will continue to invest in our open source offering, releasing an ‘enterprise-ready’ version of Meilisearch in early 2023.
Quellen co-founded Meilisearch in 2018 with two college friends, Clément Renot and Thomas Payet. The three worked together at search technology e-commerce startup Vepe and then at Louis Vuitton, where they quickly realized the intractable problem of building search. Engine provided.
“Building great search experiences has historically only been possible for companies with large technological resources,” Quellen said. “[Search is often] It is very difficult and expensive for a team to maintain and adjust.
In the year In 2020, Quellen, Renault and Payet were released Mailisearch, a search API based on their professional experience and expertise. Available on GitHub, the project has grown to over 10 million downloads, making it one of the most popular open source search projects.
Image Credits: Mailisearch
Unlike Elasticsearch and other freely available search engine frameworks, Quellen Meilisearch is designed for front-end applications with broad domains – not just narrow use cases like e-commerce discovery. natural language processing, Meilisearch developer tries to better understand the questions that users ask in any application, service or website that it builds.
Meilisearch supports major languages and ships with search filters such as price and date, as well as customizable ranking rules. It also corrects typos and errors, ensuring that errors in queries do not negatively impact the search experience.
Quellen says more than 10,000 apps rely on Mailisearch today. This is impressive given the growing competition in the “search as a service” space, which includes CommandBar, Algolia and Chameleon.
“[W]E Meilisearch quickly proved to be the long-awaited solution for developers who couldn’t find simple and powerful solutions to improve the search experience in their applications. “The open source project has seen massive adoption from the developer community and [we’re] He is actively working on monetization around the open source project.
To that end, Quellen said, Meilisearch is increasing its investment in the Meilisearch Cloud, which will launch in late November. In development over the past few months, Quellen said, Meilisearch Cloud — which offers the same experience as open-source Meilisearch but hosted on the public cloud, with pre-built integrations — has been onboarded by more than 50 companies during a private beta period.
Asked about runway and earnings, Cullen declined to comment. But Meilisearch says it will take a disciplined approach to burning through the capital it raised from Series A over the next two to three years.
To date, Mailsearch has raised $22 million. It plans to increase its headcount from 25 to 30 by the end of the year and 50 by the end of 2023.
