A Decade Powering Digital Commerce, Two Operators for the Next One – Algolia Names Steven Chung CRO and Veronica Servantez CMO

Algolia brings in new CRO and CMO with strong go-to-market track records to support its push from AI search into retrieval intelligence for enterprise AI.

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Two enterprise software operators join to scale Algolia’s shift from category-leading search to outcome-driven intelligence; the layer that turns intent into trusted, measurable outcomes for every customer, application and AI agent

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Algolia, the AI Search and Retrieval platform, today appointed Steven Chung as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Veronica Servantez as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Both join as the company pushes past the category it has led for a decade – AI Search – into outcome-driven, retrieval intelligence: the layer that turns a business's products, content and behavioral data into trusted context for every search, recommendation, application and AI agent.

Algolia moves into that market from an unusually strong base. It already handles nearly two trillion queries a year for 18,000+ customers at millisecond latency and five-nines reliability, and has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery three times. Its ambition now sits well outside the search box: to be the intelligence layer between enterprise data and every human, application and agent that queries it – understanding intent, ranking against business objectives, enforcing explicit business rules and grounding every answer in evidence – serving classic search UX, generative experiences and autonomous agents from a single foundation.

That ambition lands on a live enterprise problem. Companies putting agents into production are finding the model is the easy part; the hard part is grounding it in their own data, rules and permissions fast enough to act on. Chung and Servantez are hired to take that solution to market.

Stephen Lynch, Chief Executive Officer, Algolia, said: "Every retailer, marketplace and media company is putting agents into production – agents that shop the catalog, answer the customer, and cue up the next viewing – and most are stuck in the same place: the agent can reason, but it can't be trusted with the pricing, the merchandising or the brand. Veronica has defined new categories and built brands that moved markets. Steven has taken four companies from strong product to durable business, twice through an exit. They are proven operators for exactly this moment: taking the intelligence layer we've already built to every enterprise that needs AI it can govern, trust and measure."

Veronica Servantez, Chief Marketing Officer

Servantez joins from Genesys, where as SVP of Product Marketing she ran global go-to-market across product marketing, content, thought leadership and analyst relations for the leading AI-powered experience orchestration platform.

Before Genesys she spent six years at BigCommerce, as General Manager of Small Business and ultimately as SVP of Marketing leading an 80-person global organization. During her tenure she built their SMB Business Unit, defining a new complex SMB market segment that delivered sustained growth and record 10x revenue gains. As SVP of Marketing she delivered a 30% year-over-year increase in mid-market revenue, notably the highest growth rate in the company.

Earlier, across more than a decade at Rackspace, she led go-to-market for the managed public cloud portfolio spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud, and took its $120M Cloud Office business into a new market with 10x revenue growth with the launch of Office 365.

As CMO, Servantez will lead Algolia's global marketing organization, with a focus on establishing Retrieval Intelligence as the category analysts name and enterprises budget. Her role is to sharpen the brand for enterprise and technical buyers, and build the analyst, developer and customer proof points that carry Algolia from category-leading search provider to the Retrieval Intelligence Platform for the Discovery Economy, which comprise the markets where revenue depends on matching intent to a large, fast-changing catalog.

Veronica Servantez added: “This is an incredible time to join Algolia. Search is now becoming an entry point. What Algolia has built is an intelligent retrieval and context layer at scale which any site or AI application needs in order to deliver relevant, trusted and auditable results; the story is now much bigger than simply fast and reliable search. Very few companies get to redefine their category from a position of strength; Algolia has the technology, the reliability record and the customer base to do it. This is what excites me the most.”

Steven Chung, Chief Revenue Officer

Chung, who is based in London, joins from Starburst, where as President he led worldwide go-to-market across sales, marketing, professional services, channels, partnerships, support and revenue operations. During his tenure Starburst crossed $100M in ARR with 40% year-over-year ARR growth, 130% net dollar retention and 70% growth in EMEA, propelled by enterprise AI deals.

He was previously President of BigCommerce (NASDAQ: BIGC) and also Delphix, where he efficiently grew the business to $200M ARR resulting in the company’s acquisition by Perforce. Earlier Steven led worldwide revenue at PagerDuty (NYSE: PD) from Series B through its $2.8B IPO in 2019 and worldwide sales at Demandware (NYSE: DWRE), a publicly-traded ecommerce company, which Salesforce acquired for $2.8B in 2016.

As CRO, Chung will lead Algolia's global revenue organization, with a focus on scaling platform-level enterprise deals across the verticals where discovery drives revenue – expanding EMEA and APAC, and building out the hyperscaler and systems-integrator ecosystem, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and global SIs, through which large enterprise AI programs are bought.

Steven added: “I’ve watched several markets go through the same transition, where customers stop paying for a feature and start paying for a platform that drives strategic business value. Algolia is at that point. We deliver millisecond search and retrieval for more than 18,000 customers running mission-critical systems across different industries, use cases, and regions. Our focus is to help our customers reimagine their respective businesses in today’s agentic economy. I’m inspired by what Algolia has built and the opportunity to help accelerate the AI journey for our customers.”

About Algolia

Algolia is the leading AI Search and Retrieval platform, powering 1.75 trillion searches a year for more than 18,000 businesses. With a unified keyword and vector search and retrieval engine, Algolia delivers the world’s fastest and most scalable search and discovery technology. Companies rely on Algolia to build agentic, generative and search experiences through tools like Agent Studio. With over a decade of innovation, Algolia is redefining retrieval-powered applications and the future of AI discovery. Learn more at www.algolia.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260909051434/en/

Audrey Surette
PAN for Algolia
algolia@pancomm.com

Source: Algolia

Key Terms

arr financial

ARR, or Annual Recurring Revenue, is the predictable income a business expects to earn each year from ongoing customer subscriptions or contracts. It’s like a steady paycheck that shows the company's ability to generate consistent revenue over time, helping investors assess its stability and growth potential. ARR provides a clear picture of how well a company is performing in building long-term customer relationships.

net dollar retention financial

Net dollar retention measures how much a company's existing customers spend over time, including any increases or decreases, after accounting for cancellations or reductions. It shows whether current customers are growing their business with the company or reducing their spending, which is important for investors because it indicates the company's ability to retain and expand its revenue from current clients. A high net dollar retention suggests strong customer loyalty and growth potential.

five-nines reliability technical

Five-nines reliability means a service or system is available 99.999% of the time, which translates to roughly 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year. Investors care because that level of uptime signals very low operational risk for revenue-dependent services, critical systems, or data delivery—similar to saying a clock or elevator rarely stops, so users and customers can depend on it and the business is less likely to lose sales or reputation from outages.

millisecond latency technical

Millisecond latency is the time delay, measured in thousandths of a second, between when an action is initiated (like sending an order or a market data update) and when the result is received. For investors and traders, tiny delays matter because markets move quickly; a difference of a few milliseconds can change the price at which an order executes or how fast an algorithm responds, similar to how a brief lag can affect the outcome of a fast-moving sport or a live video game.