Algolia, the hosted search-as-a-service provider, announced today the closing of its seed round with an additional $1.2M investment led by Storm Ventures, bringing its funding total to $2.8M. The company also announced the addition of Chrisoph Janz of Point Nine Capital to the Board. Algolia aims to simplify search for developers with a real-time API that increases the relevance, scale, and speed of search on both mobile applications and websites.

'We have all had a bad search experience. Search has been an ongoing challenge for developers and applications. And the increase of small objects like videos, photos and contacts makes delivering relevant and accurate search results a bar that continually raises,' said Jason Lemkin, Managing Director at Storm Ventures and former CEO of EchoSign. 'What impressed me about Algolia was its ability to significantly reduce this complexity for developers and enable any application to have an instant, relevant, Google-like experience.'

Algolia has seen tremendous traction since its public launch in 2013, adding hundreds of customers in more than 30 countries. A recent Y Combinator graduate, Algolia initially raised $1.6M from 500 Startups, Alven Capital, Index Ventures and Point Nine Capital. The extended seed round of $1.2M is led by Storm Ventures and includes additional Angels hailing from Accenture, Box, Eventbrite, Google, Microsoft and Stripe. In addition, Point Nine Capital Co-Founder and Managing Director, Christoph Janz, has taken a Board seat.

'Whether you are an e-commerce or video site, the quality of your search results is critical to the user experience,' said Christoph Janz, Co Founder of Point Nine Capital. 'Algolia makes integration so easy there is no longer any excuse for users to experience a poor search function.'

Algolia is the only search-as-a-service provider to deliver a complete API for real-time search including an integrated dashboard that allows developers to deliver instant search results on both mobile and web applications. Algolia also enables developers to easily configure relevance with business metrics.

'We are quite humbled and excited to see the interest in search and Algolia,' said Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder and CEO of Algolia. 'Developers know the challenges search creates and we have built an API that takes a different approach to solving the problem of small objects, speed, and search relevance that can make a major impact on user experience and adoption.'

About Algolia
Founded in 2012, Algolia provides a developer-friendly SaaS API for database search. Our focus is on small objects and our API delivers a new approach to search along with new ranking rules. Algolia is optimized for databases and instantly delivers real-time, meaningful and relevant results at the first keystroke. For more information visit us at www.algolia.com