The very early beginning was in early 2012. I was doing some freelance to help a customer implement a very good instant-autocomplete. After working for more than 10 years on search engines, I had the impression that no real progress had been made: very good tech on the market but all very complex to use and tune to actually get great results. I discussed some different ideas with Nicolas (cofounder), and we decided to use our expertise to solve search problems in a different way.
Algolia disrupts the way engineers build search by solving all common pains while having a 100% white box approach. Nothing is hidden, the developer maintains complete control and the search is easily customizable. You can expect a lot of new things coming on this side :)