Algolia Acquires Velou

Algolia, a search retrieval intelligence platform provider, has acquired Velou, which uses multimodal artificial intelligence to extract context-rich product data from catalog text and images for customer-facing search results. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With this acquisition, Velou's AI-powered catalog enrichment, retail taxonomy, and product graph will run beneath Algolia's search, recommendations, personalization and Agent Studio for Algolia's 18,000 customers, helping shoppers and AI agents find the right products.

Velou adds a layer of intelligence to the Algolia platform, compounding Algolia's search, behavioral, and AI intelligence with years of retail-specific product understanding, extracting specific, evidence-grounded attributes from product text and images against a curated retail taxonomy.

Algolia expects the added product understanding to improve search results for long, specific queries, strengthen recommendations, and reduce hand-written, manual merchandising rules. It should also help new products rank before they have click history and make catalogs agent-ready.

"Algolia won search on speed. The future of discovery will be won on intelligence, and Velou strengthens one of our most important inputs: a deep, structured understanding of the products themselves. In return, Velou gets nearly 2 trillion searches a year, the behavioral signal that comes with them, and a platform where that knowledge can improve several customer experiences at once. An AI agent can only successfully recommend a product that the data accurately describes. Together, we make that data far richer," said Stephen Lynch, CEO of Algolia, in a statement.

"Shoppers feel frustration every time a specific, high-intent search comes back empty. The industry has spent years racing on retrieval, but the race that matters now is contextual and relevant product understanding. We have built one shared vocabulary that describes every product and understands every query, grounded in evidence and checked by people. Algolia puts that to work across thousands of live catalogs from day one," said Gavin Hewitt, CEO of Velou, in a statement.