Algolia is the market leader in AI Search and Retrieval which enables companies to build fast and relevant searches into their own platform. They power over 1.75 trillion searches annually, enabling more than 18,000 enterprises to build secure agentic AI, generative AI, and search experiences across digital properties. Put simply, when users search through a website or app, Algolia helps them find exactly what they need, instantly, securely, and at scale. Customers like Petsmart and Gymshark rely on the platform to handle mission-critical content and user interactions at global scale, with 99.999% platform availability and enterprise-grade information security built in by design.
Algolia operates in a SaaS-first, AI-forward environment. Cloud-based applications and artificial intelligence form the backbone of daily operations, with familiar business platforms such as Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. At the same time, Algolia is a globally distributed, remote-first organization. Employees work flexibly across the world, and that introduces unique complexities: traditional indicators of compromise aren’t always straightforward.
With employees across diverse geographies and timezones, it’s sometimes difficult to separate normal behavior from genuine security incidents. In practice, this means activity such as a user authenticating from the Netherlands one day and from France the next may be legitimate, rather than malicious activity. Algolia needed high-fidelity signals, powered by context and correlation, to respond quickly and confidently to real security incidents.
Initially, Algolia relied on each SaaS platform’s native logging and investigative tools. It worked, but at the cost of high manual effort, slow cross-platform correlation, and a heavy burden on InfoSec and IT teams during critical moments. As SaaS-specific threats increased industry-wide, the need for unified visibility became urgent.
We evaluated other SaaS security solutions in the space. But when it came down to raw horsepower under the hood, the answer became Obsidian. The depth of access controls, audit visibility, and operational reliability made it a clear fit for a global SaaS company like Algolia.
Obsidian aligned with Algolia’s need for a single platform, one that’s built to operate at global scale, ingest high volumes of SaaS telemetry, and deliver reliable visibility without introducing operational fragility.
At a high level, Algolia used Obsidian to:
Detecting real threats is critical, but what’s equally valuable is knowing when something isn’t a threat. Obsidian helps us quickly disqualify false positives, allowing the team to focus their energy on real risks instead of noise.
SaaS supply chain threats such as compromised integrations, token abuse, unauthorized third-party access are notoriously difficult to detect through traditional means like SIEMs or CASBs. They don't behave like a phishing attack or a social engineering login attempt but blend in.
Obsidian's continuous monitoring of integration behavior, combined with its broader intelligence network across SaaS environments worldwide, surfaces these indicators of compromise before they can do damage.
Breaches stemming from compromised third-party integrations are more complex detection activities; they don’t show up like traditional threats. That’s why visibility is so important. If we can see it, we can do something. Obsidian enables us to detect these supply-chain attacks early and defend both our customers and the business.
Algolia also uses Obsidian proactively to enhance its SaaS supply chain confidence. The team continuously reviews new integrations connecting to core platforms and validates that existing integrations are behaving as expected. When industry-wide supply chain events occur, they can immediately assess potential impact without waiting on vendor advisories. This turns supply chain risk from an unknown into a managed, measurable problem.
This continuous visibility and correlation of SaaS behavior allows the team to:
Supply chain threats aren't the only area where Obsidian changed the game. A separate incident illustrated just how dramatically investigation speed had improved across the board.
A user reported potential credential exposure, and the account was disabled immediately. Three information security engineers in collaboration with the Algolia IT team conducted an investigation over an 18-hour period (consuming 54 people hours in total). The team confirmed that there had been a SaaS account takeover, identified indicators of compromise, and determined that no data was stolen. However, several aspects remained unclear.
After Obsidian was deployed, Algolia revisited the same incident. With correlated SaaS telemetry across systems, the full attack path was visible in five minutes, allowing the team to confirm exactly what occurred and implement new controls to prevent future issues.
This speed is possible because Obsidian ingests and transforms signals from every connected SaaS application into a single pane of glass. That’s the difference between chasing logs and seeing the story: correlated, high-fidelity timelines let the team move from “what might have happened?” to “here’s exactly what happened, and here’s what we’re changing.”
Alerts are informed not just by local activity, but by Obsidian’s broader intelligence network across SaaS environments worldwide. By surfacing what truly matters and filtering out noise, the team spends less time chasing data and more time making fast, decisive information security calls.
A few weeks ago, we detected malicious activity at 12:40AM. With Obsidian, it took us three minutes to investigate and confirm that the IT team had successfully stopped the attacker and the company was safe. The best part? The whole team could go right back to sleep by 12:43.\
In this case, our team was able to move faster than the attacker. Obsidian helped us overcome the inherent disadvantages that defenders face.
At Algolia, security is not treated as a reactive function or a checkbox; it’s embedded into how the business operates. Leadership sees security as a shared responsibility and a prerequisite for trust as the company continues to scale its AI capabilities and SaaS footprint.
From a risk-based perspective, we’re always asking: how would we know if something went wrong, and what would the impact be? In executive briefings, Obsidian is now almost always part of the answer.
This security-first mindset shapes decision-making. Risk discussions focus on business impact, likelihood, and how quickly the organization would know if something went wrong. Obsidian supports this model by providing evidence, not just alerts. Its Knowledge Graph unifies configuration, identity, and activity into a single view, so every alert clearly shows what happened, with audit-ready proof that configuration-only SSPM tools can’t provide.
By pairing a strong information security culture with the right visibility and tooling, Algolia enables its teams to move fast, innovate confidently, and focus on what matters most: delivering secure, world-class AI-powered experiences to its customers.
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