Algolia Names Steven Chung as Chief Revenue Officer
Algolia, the AI Search and Retrieval platform, appointed Steven Chung as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).
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.
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. Steven has taken four companies from strong product to durable business, twice through an exit."
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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 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 from Series B through its $2.8B IPO in 2019 and worldwide sales at Demandware, 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.
