Julien Lemoine graduated from EPITA. He met Nicolas Dessaigne at Arisem, a company later bought by Thales, and the two worked side by side for a few years.
Lemoine then left for the search company Exalead. Dessaigne followed a few years later, and they overlapped there for only a few months. After that they decided to build their own company.
Lemoine took the technical lead. Algolia was founded on 8 October 2012, when he was 31. The first product, an offline mobile search tool, was a technical success but a commercial flop. In 2013 the founders pivoted to a hosted search API after developers asked for it.
Algolia joined Y Combinator in 2014 after a first application was rejected in 2013. It raised an $18.3 million Series A in 2015 and became a unicorn at $2.25 billion in July 2021.