Meilisearch - Open-Source Search-as-a-Service

Company & Team Introduction

Meilisearch’s search API enables any company to build incredible search experiences into their products in minutes. The company was founded in 2018 by college friends Quentin de Quelen (CEO), Clement Renault (CTO), and Thomas Payet (COO). The trio previously worked together at European conglomerate veepee.com, where they helped the company build out its search functionality when the trio changed course to work for legendary fashion house Louis Vuitton, where the company was plagued by the same difficulties surrounding search functionality. They realized that the search functionality for most websites was awful and knew why due to the many challenges they faced while building search-based products. Developers must find a solution, configure it, customize it for the specific use case, and maintain it. This challenging development environment, in turn, leads to a subpar search experience for end users. Meilisearch is headquartered in Paris, France, and has grown its globally distributed team of employees across 8+ countries.

Product Overview

Meilisearch is a high-performance search API company that gives users lightning-fast, relevant search queries and a developer-friendly experience. The search engine was written entirely in Rust, one of the world's most lightweight and performant programming languages. The company offers two products: its open-source Meilisearch search engine, which gives users instant and highly relevant search with typo tolerance, and real-time indexing and updates. The company’s other product is its Meilisearch Cloud offering for companies looking for a managed service with scalable infrastructure, high availability, managed operations, and dedicated support.

Total Addressable Market

Search is a complex but critical evil for most applications, placing Meilisearch right in the API sweet spot for developers. Companies must choose between taking large amounts of expensive engineering resources and time to market to build an in-house solution or implementing an easy-to-use API with world-class performance in minutes. The decision is easy for many companies and has created a massive market opportunity. The leading competitor in the space, Algolia, released in their 2021 Series D funding deck they estimated their addressable market in 2021 to be $14B, with strong growth expectations throughout the decade, stretching their TAM to $86.6B by 2031.

Business Model & The Numbers

Meilisearch uses a simple 3-tier managed SaaS model to monetize its products. Of course, you can host and maintain the company’s open source project on your own infrastructure for free, but for their managed cloud offerings, pricing starts at $30/month for their entry-level “build” tier to secure early-stage companies in the testing/launch faze. The “Build” plan gives users 50k searches, 100k documents, 7-day search analytics retention, and 30-day monitoring metrics retention. For larger scale companies, their “Pro” tier is $300/month, which offers 250k searches, 1M documents, priority chat and email support, 30-day search analytics and monitoring metrics retention. Meilisearch provides a “custom” tier for enterprise customers with volume-based pricing discounts, premium SLA, single sign-on, SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, and premier support. At the time of the company’s Series A in October 2022, Meilisearch already had over 10,000 applications using their APIs and had seen impressive results from Meilisearch, including Bookshop.org, which saw a 43% increase in search-based purchases using Meilisearch.

Traction

Meilisearch has quickly carved out its own niche in the market. The company now has ~175 open-source contributors; the Meilisearch Github repo has over 46,000 stars and a community of over 47,000+ developers. The company has also attracted impressive enterprise customers ranging from AI and infrastructure companies like Hugging Face and Platform.sh to 170-year-old fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton. 

Competitors

The competitive landscape for search APIs is fierce due to the enormous opportunity at stake. There are already massive players in the space, including Algolia and ElasticSearch, and each platform has pros and cons. For example, Elastic offers a search, observability, and security platform, which can be great for companies looking to consolidate vendors, but this has led to a lack of focus on improving its search product. Many users churning from Elastic cite performance issues, including slower and less relevant results than competitors like Algolia. Algolia is another leading product in the space, and while they have a strong product and focus, their pricing and target market are where Meilisearch’s opportunity arises. Elastic and Algolia are both enterprise-focused, going after the biggest logos in the industry. This has left a massively underserved SMB and mid-market segment for Meilisearch to cater to. Algolia has a great product but has priced itself out of being able to serve small and medium-sized businesses. Elastic’s lack of focus and subpar product offerings have left a gap in the market. Meilisearch is trying to fill that gap for SMBs by combining a fast, relevant, easy-to-use, competitively-priced product.

Funding

Meilisearch has raised three funding rounds in total. Their first capital raise was a $1.5M pre-seed round in 2020 led by LocalGlobe in addition to firms such as Seedcamp and Kima Ventures. Meilisearch's next funding event was their seed round, raising $5M in early 2022, spearheaded by Reid Christian from CRV, with follow-on investments from LocalGlobe and Seedcamp and new capital from Guillermo Rauch (Founder/CEO, Vercel) and Robin Vasan, Partner at Mango Capital. In late 2022, Meilisearch tapped the capital markets again, raising a 15M Series A round led by Felicis, existing investors CRV, Mango Capital, Seedcamp, LocalGlobe, Guillermo Rauch (Founder/CEO, Vercel).