Swiftype

About Swiftype

Swiftype provides cloud-based search software, enabling businesses to add customized search capabilities to their websites, applications, and internal enterprise systems. The company was founded in January 2012 by Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie. Both founders brought relevant experience from their previous roles at Scribd, with Riley having served as Director of Product and Hoxie as a software engineer.

The company's journey began after its participation in the Y Combinator incubator program in the winter of 2012. Swiftype secured a $1.7 million seed round in 2013 from prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Kleiner Perkins. This was followed by a Series A funding round led by NEA in September 2013 and a subsequent $13 million Series B round in March 2015, also led by NEA, bringing its total funding to over $20 million. A significant milestone occurred in November 2017 when Swiftype was acquired by Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, a technology Swiftype had been using to power its services from early on.

Swiftype operates on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, generating revenue through monthly subscription plans for its products. Its client base is diverse, ranging from large enterprises like AT&T, TechCrunch, and Shopify to smaller businesses across various industries. The company offers a suite of products, including Site Search, App Search, and Enterprise Search. Site Search allows organizations to replace their standard website search with a more powerful and customizable engine. Features include result customization, real-time analytics on user search behavior, typo tolerance, and the ability to manually re-rank results. App Search provides developers with tools to embed a sophisticated search experience within their applications. Enterprise Search focuses on unifying content from disparate internal data sources such as G Suite, Office 365, Dropbox, and Salesforce, creating a centralized knowledge base for employees.