Search as a service startup Algolia announced last week at the Web Summit in Dublin that they are opening up 8 new data centers around the world (raising the total to 12), and launching a new premium service for customers, called a Distributed Search Network (DSN), which will allow customers to distribute their search data across multiple data centers, meaning the end-user of an Algolia-powered search experience will be delivered search results from the closest Algolia server.
Algolia has been on a mission to conquer the search world for nearly two years now, raising big money from key strategic investors over the past year- the total funding now exceeds $2.5 Million, including iconic SaaS investor Storm Ventures. With this money, the team has been growing in California & Paris, and Algolia has begun racking up name-brand clients, like Genius, Pebble, Product Hunt, Crunchbase, Hacker News & more.
The company also announce last month their new, free Hacker Plan, a program which CEO Nicolas Dessaigne tells me was already unofficially on a per request basis, but will now be available to anyone who wishes to hack around with Algolia Search. Giving the product away for free to users who aren’t making money off of the service reminds me a lot of Autodesk’s strategy around Fusion 360, and is a great way to make sure that those who will eventually build commercial products which require search are already familiar with Algolia.