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With Pinecone releasing a vector database aimed at data scientists in 2021, it may be about time. But as use cases began to take shape last year, the company began pushing AI-driven semantic search. With the rise of LLMS in the public consciousness, companies are beginning to see the value of vector databases more.
Investors agree. Today, the company announced a $100 million Series B investment at an aftermarket valuation of $750 million. Numbers like these were hard to come by in a conservative investment environment, but the company was growing fast and investors saw an opportunity to capture the market leader, Pincon CEO and founder Ido Liberty said.
“We are the creators of this category and the leaders in it. When we came out with this, in the vector database category, no one knew the hell we were talking about. Now, of course, this is a well-structured market and the category has different players, and existing and cloud and others, and we are clearly ahead. And so it’s very easy to bet on an already established category leader,” Liberty told TechCrunch.
That first-to-market advantage has helped them grow from a handful of customers to 1,500 in the past year, and Liberty says the pace of growth is more as a consumer tool than a highly technical database. The company is seeing interest from businesses of all sizes, including tech companies like Shopify, Gong and Zapier.
“It’s like adopting consumer-based B2B deep technology stuff. I’ve never seen anything like it. And you have to accelerate building those capabilities, which is very expensive and very difficult,” he said.
It’s LLMS interest in vector databases, but it’s a different idea. While both allow you to take large amounts of data and search them, with LLM the data is baked into the model, and therefore less flexible, while the vector database is built for semantic search but has the flexibility of a database.
“This whole knowledge management plan ends up being very flexible, very efficient, very easy to operate [with a vector database],” he says. He cites GDPR compliance as an example. If you have to delete a record, it’s a very easy thing to do in a database, but because of its structure, it’s very difficult to remove bad data from the model.
Peter Levine, who is leading today’s investment at Andreessen Horowitz and will join Pincon’s board, sees the vector database as key to the AI stack. “We believe this vector database, and Pinecone in particular, has the potential to be a really fundamental part of the new AI data stack. And we feel really strongly that putting the resources behind the company will help achieve Eden’s ultimate vision,” Levine told TechCrunch.
Moreover, when Levin uses the vector database as a truth source in conjunction with LLMS, it can reduce the illusion problem we saw with LLMS. “Well, they work together. I mean, imagine LLM as an application that sits on top of this database, and what the database does is capture data and feed it into LLM to get accurate answers for long-term result storage. . Liberty similarly thinks of this as a database that acts as LLM’s long-term memory.
With a runway of 100 million dollars, the company hired. Today it has about 100 employees, and Liberty expects to reach 150 or 200 by the end of the year.
The vector database space has been heating up since Pinecon started a few years ago with players Qdrant, Zilliz, and Chroma, all of which have been raising funds recently.
Today’s investment was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from ICONIQ Growth and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital. The company raised $138 million last year, including a $28 million Series A round and a $10 million seed investment in 2021.
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