Velou (now part of Algolia)

When I founded Velou, the idea was that product data shouldn’t sit still. It should keep up as shoppers, trends and seasons change, so the gap between “I’m looking for…” and “that’s the one” keeps shrinking. Commerce-1 was our biggest step toward that: a model trained on retail data and taught by merchandisers, that knows an off-shoulder neckline from a halter and why the difference matters to the person searching. Today Velou becomes part of Algolia. Algolia sits exactly where product data meets the shopper, which is where enrichment does the most good. I can’t think of a better home for this work. To the Velou team: you built this. To our customers, who backed the product-side bet early, and to our investors, advisors and supporters, who stayed with us through every turn: thank you. And to Stephen Lynch and everyone at Algolia, we're looking forward to building the next part with you. https://lnkd.in/g6Zfdsz8

Velou is joining Algolia! I am beyond excited to announce that Velou has been acquired by Algolia. When we started working with Algolia, the pitch to retailers was simple: we fix your product data, they make it findable. Customers who ran both saw the difference quickly. Joining Algolia means Velou stops being an extra step in someone’s integration plan and becomes part of the platform retailers already run search on. Algolia customers get Commerce-1 and the enrichment work we’ve spent years on. Our team gets the reach to put it in front of far more shoppers. I’ve helped scale companies like Bluecore and Attentive, and I know what it looks like when a product finds the right home. This is that. To our customers: 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. To the Velou team: thank you. This happened because of your efforts and what you built. To the Velou investors who believed in us from day 1, thank you for your unwavering support, FUSE Ascend ANIMO Ventures Translink Capital To Stephen Lynch and everyone at Algolia: let’s get to work. https://lnkd.in/gFUDvZmg

Search was won on speed. Discovery will be won on intelligence. That's why Algolia acquired Velou today. For more than a decade, we made the search box fast. Then we built intelligence on top of it – NeuralSearch, Recommendations, Personalization, Agent Studio. But there was always another side to the equation. Behavior tells us what shoppers do. Retrieval tells us what they mean. Nobody was telling us what the product actually is. Here's the problem every merchandising leader I've talked to this year lives with. Your customers ask for more than your catalog knows. Product data arrives from hundreds of suppliers, inconsistent & missing the attributes shoppers actually search for. So your team patches it by hand with tags, synonyms & rules – & the job never ends because the catalog changes daily. The people you hired to merchandise the assortment end up fixing the data underneath it. Velou fixes that at the source. It reads the text & imagery you already have and creates the attributes a merchandiser would add with unlimited time – navy, midi, fabric weight, occasion – mapped to a retail taxonomy and refreshed as the catalog changes. Every attribute is grounded in evidence from the product itself. That matters more than it sounds. A confident wrong attribute is worse than a missing one – & Velou chose the disciplined path when a looser one would have been easier to sell. We've partnered with Velou for a while – but starting today, we're one company. Welcome to the team Gavin Hewitt, Sadee Gamhewa & the Velou team. Let’s go. I wrote more on why we did it here: https://lnkd.in/eABy4Unj

CB Insights just named us one of the high-momentum private companies building the infrastructure for autonomous buying. That list isn't about hype. It's about who's actually building toward a world where AI agents make purchase decisions on a buyer's behalf. Most ecommerce companies are still optimizing for a human scrolling a page. We've been building for something else: structured, agent-readable product data that lets an AI actually reason about what it's looking at, not just display it. This recognition is a signal, not a finish line. Agentic commerce isn't a future trend. It's already being built underneath the surfaces we use today. Proud of the team for the work that got us here. The storefront is becoming infrastructure. Glad to be the ones building it.