YC startup Swiftype raises $1.7M seed round from Andreessen; NEA; Kleiner

Swiftype has raised $1.7 million from venture capital bigwigs for its search engine software.

The Y Combinator company provides solutions that help companies integrate search engines into their websites, no coding required. You enter a URL and Swiftype’s technology will crawl the site and quickly create a search engine. There are “drag-and-drop” tools to customize rankings, and you can reorganize results from Swiftype’s dashboard. The software also enables autocomplete and is optimized for mobile. Once the search engine is up and running, Swiftype provides analytics on what users are searching for, finding, not finding. and popular content.

Swiftype was founded in January 2012. Since then it has grown fast; more than 70,000 websites now use Swiftype. Clients include well-known companies such as Facebook, Mixpanel, MailChimp, Twilio, Twitch, SendGrid, Shopify, BestBuy, and the Mayo Clinic.  Swiftype-powered sites generate 130 million queries every month, and search queries are up by more than 15 times from last year.

Search is an important feature of any website. It helps users navigate a site and quickly find what they’re looking for. Businesses that don’t have large development teams may not have the bandwidth to build their own intelligent search engines. Swiftype lets them outsource this service by taking care of all the nitty-gritty details of hosting a search engine. Michael Skok, a cloud investor with North Bridge Venture Partners, said that “outservicing” is one of the most exciting trends in cloud computing right now. 

Editor’s note: Our upcoming CloudBeat conference, Sept. 9-10 in San Francisco, will be tackling revolutionary cases of enterprise cloud usage. Register today!

“Businesses are increasingly integrating cloud services into their processes,” he said to VentureBeat. “The whole point here is that if computing is simple as a utility, people are able to use it much more effectively. They can outsource, or outservice, everything they aren’t uniquely good at.”

Swiftype outservices search.  With this round of funding, it will continue to develop its technology and grow its customer base. Andreessen Horowitz seed fund, New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins, and Ignition contributed to this seed round, along with angel investors Sam Altman, SV Angel, Alex Ohanian, Paul Buchheit, Crunchfund, Garry Tan, Harj Tagger, and others.

The company is based in San Francisco.