About
SearchLayer.

We believe on-site search can be better. And what we learned at Albert Heijn works for every online store.

Why we started.

We didn't start SearchLayer because Europe had no alternatives. We started it because we think we can do search better.

At Albert Heijn we saw up close what good search does for a large online store, and we laid the foundation there that we now keep building on. With SearchLayer we bring those learnings to other e-commerce shops.

AI is changing how customers search and find products. Online stores that don't keep up will fall behind. We make sure they don't.

public Based in the Netherlands

dns Hosted in NL and DE

storefront Built for European e-commerce

The co-founders.

Arnold van Wijnbergen

Co-founder

I started my career in the wholesale and e-commerce business in the early 2000s at METRO Group. At the time, I spent most of my time working on optimizing supply chains with technology, pioneering future store concepts, and bootstrapping the first Makro Online e-commerce platform.

Old love never dies, so during the COVID-19 pandemic, I helped Albert Heijn redesign their search and migrate their online customer platform to a scalable cloud solution. You may have searched for recipes or products there, didn’t you?

Today, at SearchLayer, we help e-commerce companies tackle similar challenges and get more out of their search technology. My drive is to make product discovery better for customers and create real business value in an increasingly AI-driven world.

LinkedIn open_in_new

Sven Mollinga

Co-founder

Engineering has always been at the core of who I am. Over the past 12 years I’ve worked across the stack, from Site Reliability Engineering at Albert Heijn to Linux managed hosting, and I spent the last four years as CTO of Shock Media. What drew me in every time was the challenge: keeping critical systems running when downtime costs real money.

I focus on uptime and performance and do it without making systems more complex than they need to be. I start with the problem, not a ready-made solution. I specialize in combining self-hosted AI with search. I connect language models with search backends, using semantic and vector search. Your data never leaves your environment, and the AI’s answers are enriched with context from your own data.