Algolia raises $53 million for its search engine API

French startup Algolia just raised a $53 million Series B round led by Accel, a couple of years after raising $18.3 million with… Accel also leading the round. So it looks like it’s a love story between the VC firm and the software-as-a-service startup.

The reason is quite simple. Algolia is still growing like crazy, with its annual recurring revenue doubling every year. Algolia’s goal hasn’t changed — the startup wants to provide the best search experience to everyone building websites and apps out there.

Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr fund, Jyoti Bansal, Clark Valberg and Des Traynor are also participating in today’s round, as well as existing investors Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital and Storm Ventures.

Just like Twilio is handling calls and text messages for you so you don’t have to, Algolia can also take care of the search box on your website. In just a few lines of code, you can replace your search feature with Algolia’s search.

You’ll need to feed Algolia with your search data and customize it to your needs, as well. After that, every time a user starts typing a letter, it’ll query one of Algolia’s servers and return results in no time. It’s quite remarkable to see how quickly and accurately it works.

And chances are that you’ve been using Algolia without realizing it. The company is managing the search feature on Medium, DigitalOcean, Twitch, Stripe, Periscope, Crunchbase and many others.

The company now has 3,000 customers and handles 25 billion searches every month. Recently, the startup launched a fallback version of Algolia called Algolia Offline that you can use if you’re in airplane mode or don’t have a strong signal. Algolia also optimized its search feature for places.

With today’s funding round, Algolia is going to open another office in London after Paris, San Francisco, New York City and Atlanta. And of course, the company wants to get new customers, build new features and maybe one day become the Stripe of search.