Algolia, a privately owned company headquartered in the US, was founded in 2012 and employs approximately 760 individuals. Functioning in the software development sector, the company provides an API-platform for search, recommendations, and predictions.
Shoppers are increasingly using plain language queries such as “warm jacket for cycling in rain” and “gift for a coffee nerd under €50” in search bars, a trend observed on October 8, 2026, reflecting the influence of AI assistants and smart autocomplete. This development follows Algolia's announcement on October 7, 2026, that it acquired Velou, a New York-based company. Velou specializes in multimodal AI, which extracts context-rich product data from catalog text and images, powering customer-facing search results for more than 50 retail and premium brand enterprise customers. The acquisition is intended to expand Algolia's AI product discovery offerings for retailers and strengthen product intelligence for AI shopping, addressing the challenge that a retailer can lose a sale if its catalog does not adequately describe what a shopper wants. Velou's AI-powered catalog enrichment, retail taxonomy, and product graph will run beneath Algolia's search, recommendations, personalization, and Agent Studio for its 18,000 customers, aiming to help both human shoppers and AI agents find the right products more effectively.
Algolia's customers primarily consist of hospitality and iT Services and IT Consulting companies. Examples of Algolia's customers include Club Med and Easy24.
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