Meilisearch is a technology company.
Meilisearch has raised $22.0M across 3 funding rounds.
Meilisearch has raised $22.0M in total across 3 funding rounds.
Meilisearch is an open-source search engine built in Rust, designed for developers to integrate fast, relevant, and typo-tolerant search into websites, apps, and workflows. It serves e-commerce, media, enterprise, and non-profit sectors by solving the pain of slow, irrelevant, or complex search solutions like Elasticsearch, offering features such as full-text search, semantic search, AI-hybrid search, faceted search, geo-search, and multi-tenancy.[1][2][3][5] The company powers discovery for users worldwide, with strong growth including over 10 million GitHub downloads by 2022, a $15M Series A in 2022, and a shift toward enterprise offerings like Meilisearch Cloud.[1][3]
Meilisearch was co-founded in 2018 (public launch in 2020) by Quentin de Quelen, Clément Renault, and Thomas Payet, Paris-based engineers who previously collaborated on search tech at e-commerce firm Veepee and luxury brand Louis Vuitton.[1][3] Frustrated by the high cost, maintenance burden, and poor developer experience of existing search engines, they built Meilisearch from scratch in Rust as an open-source alternative.[1][3][5] Early traction exploded post-2020 launch, with hundreds of adopters and rapid GitHub star growth signaling product-market fit, leading to the $15M Series A led by Felicis in 2022 to fuel enterprise expansion.[1][3]
Meilisearch rides the wave of AI-powered search democratization, where developers demand instant, relevant results amid exploding data volumes in e-commerce, media, and apps—timing perfectly with Rust's rise for performant systems and the shift from monolithic tools like Elasticsearch (now a $6.9B giant with licensing shifts).[3][4][5] Market forces like low-latency needs in global apps and cost pressures on startups favor its lightweight, OSS model, influencing the ecosystem by lowering barriers to superior search and inspiring "search everywhere" from edge devices to workflows.[1][4] As enterprises seek alternatives to vendor lock-in, Meilisearch accelerates innovation in AI-hybrid retrieval, competing with Perplexity and You.com while empowering non-tech teams.[2]
Meilisearch is poised to dominate as the go-to OSS search layer in an AI-first world, with v1.0's enterprise stability (2023) paving for global Cloud distribution to slash latency worldwide.[1][5] Trends like edge computing, multimodal search, and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) will amplify its momentum, potentially mirroring Elastic's scale if it nails sales execution post-Series A.[3][4] Expect team growth, deeper AI integrations, and international expansion—solidifying its role as the developer-friendly engine putting search everywhere, from indie apps to Fortune 500 backends, just as its founders envisioned.[1][4]
Meilisearch has raised $22.0M in total across 3 funding rounds.
Meilisearch's investors include Abstract Ventures, Alt Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Audacious Ventures, LGF, Stripe, Todd and Rahul's Angel Fund, Akshay Kothari, Christian Reber, Gokul Rajaram, Mathilde Collin, Scott Belsky.
Meilisearch has raised $22.0M across 3 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $15.0M Series A in October 2022.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 1, 2022 | $15.0M Series A | Abstract Ventures, Alt Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Audacious Ventures, LGF, Stripe, Todd and Rahul's Angel Fund, Akshay Kothari, Christian Reber, Gokul Rajaram, Mathilde Collin, Scott Belsky, Guillermo Rauch | |
| Jan 1, 2022 | $5.0M Seed | Abstract Ventures, Alt Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, AngelList Syndicator, Audacious Ventures, CRV, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, LAUNCHub Ventures, LGF, Mango Capital, Notion Capital, Sequoia Capital, Singular, Stripe, Todd and Rahul's Angel Fund, True Ventures, Visionaries Club, Akshay Kothari, Augusto Marietti, Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, Christian Reber, Gokul Rajaram, Mathilde Collin, Scott Belsky, Guillermo Rauch | |
| Aug 1, 2020 | $2.0M Seed | Accel, Firstminute Capital, Kima Ventures, LocalGlobe, Seedcamp, Assaf Wand, Robert Gentz, Thomas Plantenga |