Meilisearch raises a $15M Series A to offer enterprise-focused products and services

We are happy to announce that Meilisearch has raised a 15M$ Series A. This round was led by Felicis with the participation of Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, and our existing investors CRV, Mango Capital, LocalGlobe, and Seedcamp. This new financing will help us to fulfill our mission—making search more accessible and more efficient for everyone—while allowing us to bring Meilisearch to an even larger audience worldwide.

A brief history of Meilisearch

We founded Meilisearch in 2019 because we were dissatisfied with the search solutions available on the market. We noticed how slow and irrelevant search results could degrade user experience in apps and websites. There had to be a better way.

While working on search technology at large e-commerce companies, we gained experience in building efficient search engines. So we decided to create our own search engine from scratch in Rust, and we open-sourced it to help every other developer struggling like us.

Meilisearch timeline

In 2020, we introduced Meilisearch to the world. In no time at all, hundreds of developers and organizations worldwide had embraced it. After witnessing such quick user adoption, we realized that there was a significant product-market fit.

GitHub star growth

Since then, we have experienced incredible growth in open-source adoption—one of the fastest growth rates of any COSS project. Our GitHub star traction is an indicator of how trendy Meilisearch has become, as well as how eagerly awaited our product has been by a massive community. Every month there are more than 100K users downloading Meilisearch and more than 10K applications using it.

This will remain unchanged

Meilisearch is and will always be open source. It’s part of our DNA and will stay in our company culture and how we think about products for as long as we exist.

Working in open source is incredibly rewarding, particularly with a community like ours. Our community members actively contribute to our codebase and our roadmap. Through their feedback, they help us consider use cases we wouldn’t have thought of. They’re our best ambassadors and introduce Meilisearch usage within their companies. I don’t know how Meilisearch could exist without the support of our community.

Meilisearch <3 Open Source

Creating a company has one huge advantage: you can shape it as you want. Meaning that you have full power over not only the direction the product is growing in, but also the culture the company will have. I’m so proud of the fantastic team we have created at Meilisearch. Through our joint effort, we have succeeded in creating a truly remarkable place to work.

Meilisearch perks and benefits

Growing a company is hard. Keeping our culture is and will be hard. That’s why we spend so much time on HR-related decisions; we know the only way to keep our culture is by ensuring that employees grow with the company and carefully hiring those who fit with what we already have. We have big objectives, but we do not want to lose anyone on the road to obtaining them.

Looking forward

When we started building Meilisearch, it was with the idea to create a search solution that could fit both individual developers’ and enterprises’ needs. While we spent the last three years focusing on creating the best tool for developers and growing our open-source community, we are now entering the next phase: scaling Meilisearch’s team, product, and business for enterprises.

It’s super simple to use and put Meilisearch into production. However, most enterprises don’t want to manage software they didn’t create. Enterprises are also asking for more than just Meilisearch, the open-source search engine: they need a search solution with scalability, geo-replication, and analytics. To answer this demand, we have developed Meilisearch Cloud, a hosted version of Meilisearch that allows users to instantaneously have access to our technology in a few clicks. We would like to thank our beta testers, without whom Meilisearch Cloud would not exist as it does today!

Let me now give you a brief overview of Meilisearch’s aspirations for the future.

Fast everywhere

We are, without a doubt, in a global world where the users and the data can be anywhere. One core principle of Meilisearch is to return an answer to any search query in a few milliseconds. But what if the service is hosted in the US and the search request originates from the EU? The experience will be degraded due to latency. That is why, especially with Meilisearch Cloud, we would love to break this barrier by creating a globally distributed search service. It’ll be a huge and very exciting challenge for our teams to make this possible.

We don't have small dreams. In the future, we would like to see Meilisearch running on the edge! We have already worked on a bunch of prototypes, and we would love to see how this technology could improve the search experience for our clients’ apps.

Easier than ever

In the early days of Meilisearch, we understood that developer experience is key to success. Today, we are super proud to have a product so simple that it’s possible for any developer to try it in just a few minutes. Developer experience will remain a primary focus of our product and engineering team.

There are two parts to integrating Meilisearch. The first one is connecting Meilisearch to your data and making sure it’s synchronized. The second is building an interface that allows your users access to this data through our search API.

Concerning the first one, we will make sure that it’s easy for any developer to connect Meilisearch to their stacks. We already have SDKs for most languages, integrations for the most known web frameworks, plugins, and some awesome tools. But we will go even further. Being able to connect Meilisearch to your data in a few clicks will become a reality.

On the frontend side, it’s already possible to create a custom search bar thanks to our SDKs and libraries, particularly instant-meilisearch. Again, we would go further. We want every developer to be able to install a high-quality search bar into their website or application with no effort. That is why we would like to simplify the front-end installation of Meilisearch to require only a single line of JavaScript.

Smarter than before

Everyone is different, which means that for the same request, different people should receive different answers based on their preferences. Meilisearch already parses most languages perfectly—we are always improving this part thanks to the community. The next big milestone for us would be to bring even more logic into the comprehension of user intent and the personalization of users’ results based on their previous searches or external data.

Not only is each person different, but each company is too. Most companies have totally different use cases that require different search behavior. A Notion search and a Booking search will not have the same requirement or the same business logic. To be honest, that’s one of the biggest challenges regarding the search topic. Today, even if we accommodate most of the regular use cases, we have a clear view of how to make Meilisearch customizable depending on the business logic. This will allow enterprises to put their ML models right into the Meilisearch engine.

What’s next

These projects will take time. So I'd like to tease you a little bit about some of the exciting things coming up in the next few months.

The very first project is one that has been talked about for months. One of the most important projects started since the creation of the search engine. I'm talking about Meilisearch Cloud. For the many people waiting in the waiting list and the companies that can't wait for the GA of Meilisearch Cloud, your wish will soon be granted! Our team is working hard to get it out as soon as possible.

We have a second big announcement, and it will make every developer super happy. We are super proud to announce that Meilisearch V1 is planned!

If you look hard enough, you will find traces of the release day. Even if Meilisearch has been technically stable for years, we made a bet not to go beyond V1 in order to be able to iterate as much as possible on our developer experience. This was a great success. Now that we have stabilized our API, it is time to make V1 a reality.

As we are constantly releasing new features and projects, I recommend you to subscribe to our newsletter or follow the specific repos that interest you on Github. If you have specific needs or ideas for us, don't hesitate to leave feedback on our roadmap.

Join us

As you may have already understood, we are ambitious at Meilisearch. Thanks to this last fundraising, we have everything we need to go further. The only thing we are missing now is you.

If you want to know more about how it is to work at Meilisearch, I invite you to read our blogr discuss it with the team on our community Slack. If you’re already convinced about joining Meilisearch, we have not released every open position, so don’t hesitate to make a spontaneous application. We will hire a lot of engineers, PM, PMM, and other roles in the months and years to come. https://jobs.lever.co/meili

Press kit

Read our Press Release below

Meilisearch series A PR October 2022("Download")

Media Coverage:

• Techcrunch - Meilisearch lands $15M investment to grow its ‘search-as-a-service’ business
• Felicis Ventures - Searching for the Edge: How Meilisearch Is Building the Search Engine of the Future