If you thought the search engine game was over, Algolia, Inc. would like to have a word.

The hosted-search startup just found its way into the exclusive investment portfolio of venture capital titan Accel Partner as part of an $18.3 million funding round announced this morning. That increases Algolia’s total bankroll more than seven-fold. The cash infusion will help fuel the continued development and expansion of its namesake search service.

Algolia has managed to carve out a unique niche for itself in a market dominated almost entirely by Google thanks to a simple but evidently effective spin on the traditional custom search formula. Instead of offering a packaged search engine for customers to install in their cloud services and e-commerce sites, it hosts everything in its own data centers and provides an application program interface (API) that website operators can use to quickly add search-as-a service.

That kills two birds with one stone, according to Algolia. Not only does it avoid the need to manually implement a search feature or build one from scratch – which can take weeks or longer – but it also removes the server burden of handling queries. That is particularly appealing tp Web properties such as online stores where the ability to deliver results quickly is key to closing the sale.

Allowing organizations to meet that expectation without having to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to support millions of users’ worth of requests every week has quietly made Algolia a force to contend with in the once largely overlooked world of online content management. The startup has managed to land a host of big-name customers such as Etsy Inc. and DC shoes Inc. over its three short years of existence, along with top online tech destinations such as Y Combinator’s Hacker News and Medium.

That helped Algolia establish a particularly strong reach in Silicon Valley, which was no doubt a contributing factor to the number of high-profile backers that participated in the latest funding round. The list includes Parse co-founder Ilya Sukhar, Kevin Rose of Digg fame and Docker Inc. CEO Solomon Hykes, whose own startup has also been a subject of investor interest lately.

The funding will enable Algolia to scale operations, hire more developers to help build new features for its service, as well as expand internationally. Seeing that the startup already boasts more than 600 paying customers across 50 countries, that latter effort will focus center on expanding its network of 14 data centers to more overseas locations.
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