Meilisearch
Meilisearch is a Rust-based, open-source search and AI retrieval engine (MIT-licensed) offered as Meilisearch Cloud SaaS, serving 20,000+ developer teams and enterprises with sub-50ms full-text, hybrid, vector, and RAG-powered search across global multi-region clusters.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2018
- HeadquartersParis, France
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Meilisearch does
Meilisearch is a unified search and AI retrieval platform built on a Rust-powered engine with memory-mapped storage, DiskANN-based vector search, sharding, and replication. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Paris (incorporated as Meili SAS), the company distributes its technology through an MIT-licensed open-source Community Edition (58.3k GitHub stars, 138 contributors) and a managed SaaS, Meilisearch Cloud, with multi-region clusters across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. The product surface spans sub-50ms full-text search, faceted and federated search, geosearch, hybrid keyword/semantic retrieval, multimodal search across image/video/audio, auto-embeddings, and RAG infrastructure with an OpenAI-compatible conversational API and an MCP server for AI agents.
The company operates a hybrid go-to-market: product-led growth via self-serve Cloud with a 14-day free trial and a free tier, combined with an enterprise motion offering SOC 2 Type II, GDPR compliance, SSO/SAML, and custom SLAs up to 99.999%. Monetization is primarily subscription-based across Cloud Pro and Enterprise tiers, with the open-source Community Edition functioning as a freemium funnel. The customer base of 20,000+ teams spans enterprise (Louis Vuitton, Hugging Face, Bookshop.org, Samtec, Symfony), mid-market (Qogita), and startups (Rayon, Touchless, CarbonGraph), concentrated in e-commerce, SaaS, media, and AI/ML workloads.
Meilisearch has raised approximately $20M in total disclosed funding, comprising a 2020 pre-seed led by LocalGlobe (~$1.76M), a $5M seed led by CRV in January 2022, and a $15M Series A led by Felicis in October 2022 with participation from Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) and existing investors. The team remains small (11–50 employees) and remote-first, with three co-founders (CEO Quentin, CTO Kero, COO Thomas) leading the organization. Recent strategic emphasis is on enterprise readiness and AI retrieval, evidenced by Launch Week Q1 2026 which shipped sharding/replication, SSO/SAML+MFA, conversational chat, search performance inspector, and document joins.
Meilisearch firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Meilisearch
- Legal name
- Meili
- Website
- https://meilisearch.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2018
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- Meilisearch is a Rust-based, open-source search and AI retrieval engine (MIT-licensed) offered as Meilisearch Cloud SaaS, serving 20,000+ developer teams and enterprises with sub-50ms full-text, hybrid, vector, and RAG-powered search across global multi-region clusters.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Meilisearch industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Search Engine Software
- NAICS
- Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (519290), Web Search Portals, Libraries, Archives, and Other Information Services (5192)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Enterprise Search, Indexing & Content Discovery (HDAEAGAH)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases & Knowledge Grounding (HDAAACAE), Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs) (HDAEANAH), Search Engines (BPAMAAAB)
Keywords
Where Meilisearch is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Paris
- HQ country
- France
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices1 record
Markets served
Meilisearch business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales
Revenue model
- Meilisearch Cloud SaaS: Managed cloud service with automatic scaling, updates, and maintenance. Subscription-based pricing with usage tiers and free trial for new users.
- Enterprise Edition: Custom enterprise licensing with SOC 2 compliance, SSO/SAML, dedicated support, and custom SLAs for mission-critical deployments
- Community Edition (Open Source): MIT-licensed self-hosted version with full feature access, revenue generated through community adoption leading to cloud/enterprise conversions
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Monthly | Free tier with basic features for small projects |
| Subscription | Monthly | Cloud Pro plans with scalable resources |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise plans with premium support and compliance |
| Freemium | Pay-as-you-go | Self-hosted Community Edition |
Go-to-market motion3 records
Distribution channels5 records
Marketing channels8 records
Meilisearch product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Meilisearch provides an open-source search engine built on Rust, available as a self-hosted MIT-licensed Community Edition and as a fully managed cloud service (Meilisearch Cloud). It delivers sub-50ms full-text, vector, hybrid, and multimodal search with built-in typo tolerance, faceting, geosearch, and AI retrieval capabilities including RAG infrastructure for developers, SaaS platforms, e-commerce, media, and enterprise teams.
Product overview
Meilisearch is a unified search and AI retrieval platform offered as both a managed cloud service (Meilisearch Cloud) and self-hosted open-source engine. The core platform provides lightning-fast full-text search with sub-50ms response times, built on Rust for performance. The product portfolio spans search capabilities across three tiers: foundational features (full-text search, faceted search, geosearch, filtering/sorting), AI-powered capabilities (semantic search, hybrid search, vector storage, multimodal search), and advanced AI applications (RAG infrastructure, conversational search, personalization). Meilisearch Cloud handles managed deployment with multi-region clusters while self-hosting offers MIT-licensed flexibility.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Meilisearch Cloud Fully managed SaaS deployment of the Meilisearch engine with automatic scaling, updates, and maintenance, multi-region cluster options (NYC, LON, SFO, FRA, SGP, JPN, SAO, PAR, SYD), and a 14-day free trial. Targets developers, startups, and enterprise teams needing production-grade reliability without DevOps overhead.
- Meilisearch (Open Source) Lightning-fast, developer-friendly open-source search engine built on Rust, released under the MIT license for self-hosting. Provides sub-50ms response times, typo tolerance, faceted search, zero-config relevancy, and full feature access. Targets individual developers, startups, and organizations wanting full data control without vendor lock-in.
Quantifiable outcome
- 43% improvement in purchase conversion
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use Meilisearch
Customer profileNamed customers13 records
Segments7 records
Ideal customer profiles6 records
Meilisearch technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration12 records
AI capability9 records
Feature11 records
Meilisearch partnerships and signals
Strategic signalScale indicators8 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights5 records
Meilisearch competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Elasticsearch (Elastic NV): Elasticsearch is the incumbent open-source search and analytics engine and the primary reference competitor Meilisearch compares against. Both deliver full-text search, faceting, and aggregations; Meilisearch explicitly differentiates on developer experience, simplicity, and AI features.
- Algolia: Algolia is a leading API-first SaaS search platform serving e-commerce and digital experiences, comparable in offering to Meilisearch Cloud. Both target developer-led adoption, search-as-you-type interfaces, and enterprise retail/e-commerce use cases.
- Typesense: Typesense is an open-source typo-tolerant search engine that competes head-to-head with Meilisearch in the developer-focused OSS search category. Both offer self-hosted and managed cloud deployments with comparable performance and feature sets.
- Pinecone: Pinecone is a managed vector database purpose-built for RAG and semantic search applications, directly comparable to Meilisearch's vector storage and hybrid search capabilities. CarbonGraph notably migrated from Pinecone to Meilisearch.
- Weaviate: Weaviate is an open-source vector database with hybrid search and RAG features, listed by Meilisearch as a direct competitor in 2026 Enterprise RAG Platforms buying guides. Both target AI application developers building retrieval pipelines.
- Qdrant: Qdrant is an open-source vector similarity search engine with Rust components, directly compared by Meilisearch in its competitive positioning. Both serve AI/ML teams building semantic search and RAG applications.
- OpenSearch (Amazon): OpenSearch is the AWS-backed open-source fork of Elasticsearch offering full-text and vector search capabilities. Both are open-source search engines; OpenSearch benefits from deep AWS integration and managed-service scale.
- Vespa: Vespa is Yahoo's open-source big-data serving engine combining vector search, lexical search, and ML model inference at scale. Listed alongside Meilisearch in 2026 Enterprise RAG platform comparisons as a hybrid retrieval layer.
Broad incumbents
- Microsoft Azure AI Search: Azure AI Search is Microsoft's managed cloud search service with vector and hybrid retrieval integrated into the broader Azure ecosystem. Competes with Meilisearch Cloud for enterprise customers already standardised on Microsoft infrastructure.
- Google Vertex AI Search: Vertex AI Search is Google's enterprise search and RAG offering combining search, grounding, and Gemini-based generative answers. Competes with Meilisearch for enterprise AI retrieval workloads, with the leverage of the Google Cloud platform.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Meilisearch social profiles
Digital presenceMeilisearch compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance2 records
Meilisearch financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Meilisearch leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles1 record
Meilisearch funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds3 records
Investors6 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Meilisearch M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Meilisearch
What does Meilisearch do?
Meilisearch provides an open-source search engine built on Rust, available as a self-hosted MIT-licensed Community Edition and as a fully managed cloud service (Meilisearch Cloud). It delivers sub-50ms full-text, vector, hybrid, and multimodal search with built-in typo tolerance, faceting, geosearch, and AI retrieval capabilities including RAG infrastructure for developers, SaaS platforms, e-commerce, media, and enterprise teams.
Is Meilisearch a public or private company?
Meilisearch is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Meilisearch founded?
Meilisearch was founded in 2018. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is Meilisearch based?
Meilisearch is headquartered in Paris, France, in the Europe region.
How does Meilisearch make money?
Three revenue lines are on record. Meilisearch Cloud SaaS are the primary driver. The others are enterprise Edition and community Edition (Open Source).
Who are Meilisearch's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Elasticsearch (Elastic NV), Algolia, Typesense, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, OpenSearch (Amazon) and Vespa. Broad incumbents are Microsoft Azure AI Search and Google Vertex AI Search.
Does Meilisearch have an API?
Yes. Meilisearch provides a REST API for search functionality. The API enables developers to add documents to indexes, configure search settings, perform searches with filters, facets, sorting, and typo tolerance. Supports multi-search across indexes. Available as Meilisearch Cloud (managed SaaS) or self-hosted open-source (MIT license). SDKs available for JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java, .NET, Swift, and Dart. Developer documentation is at www.meilisearch.com/docs.
What industry is Meilisearch in?
Meilisearch's product category is Search Engine Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEAGAH, Enterprise Search, Indexing & Content Discovery, with a secondary code of HDAAACAE, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases & Knowledge Grounding. Its NAICS code is 519290 and its SIC code is 7372.