Algolia names Chung & Servantez to AI growth roles

Algolia has appointed Steven Chung as Chief Revenue Officer and Veronica Servantez as Chief Marketing Officer as it expands beyond search into software that links AI agents with company data.

London-based Chung joins from Starburst, where he was President and oversaw sales, marketing, professional services, channels, partnerships, support and revenue operations. Servantez joins from Genesys, where she was Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and led global go-to-market work across product marketing, content, thought leadership and analyst relations.

The appointments add two senior executives as Algolia seeks to broaden its role in what it calls retrieval intelligence, focused on connecting business data, rules and permissions to search systems, recommendation tools, applications and AI agents.

The push builds on a business that says it already handles nearly two trillion queries a year for more than 18,000 customers. According to Algolia, companies adopting AI agents often find the main challenge is not the model itself, but connecting it to internal data and controls quickly enough for practical use.

Chung will lead Algolia's global revenue organisation, including expansion across EMEA and APAC, and work with cloud providers and systems integrators such as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Before Starburst, Chung held senior roles at BigCommerce, Delphix, PagerDuty and Demandware. His background includes guiding companies through periods of growth and acquisitions, as well as public market milestones, according to Algolia.

Servantez will oversee Algolia's global marketing organisation and market positioning as it broadens its enterprise AI business. Her remit includes building awareness among enterprise and technical buyers and strengthening the company's case with analysts, developers and customers.

Earlier in her career, she spent six years at BigCommerce, where she was General Manager of Small Business and later Senior Vice President of Marketing, leading an 80-person global team. She also held roles at Rackspace, where she worked on go-to-market strategy for managed public cloud products across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

Stephen Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of 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."

Growth plans

Algolia has long been associated with search and product discovery tools used by retailers, marketplaces and media groups. It is now positioning itself more broadly around systems that help businesses deliver verified responses and recommendations to both people and software agents.

In practice, that means using product, content and behavioural data to guide search rankings, recommendations and generated answers while applying business rules and evidence. Algolia argues this approach matters as businesses look to use AI agents in customer service, commerce and media environments where pricing, merchandising and brand controls remain sensitive.

Servantez said the opportunity lies in presenting Algolia's work as broader than search.

"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," Servantez said.

For Chung, the task is to turn that positioning into larger enterprise deals across sectors where discovery and recommendations influence revenue. Those sectors include online retail, marketplaces and media, where search and recommendation tools often sit close to customer spending decisions.

"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," Chung said.