Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Pinecone Raises $100M Series B to Provide Long-Term Memory for AI 

NEW YORK, April 28, 2023 -- Pinecone, the vector database company providing long-term memory for AI, announced it has raised $100M in Series B funding at a $750M valuation. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from ICONIQ Growth and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.

Since introducing the vector database in 2021, Pinecone’s innovative technology and explosive growth have disrupted the $9B search infrastructure market and made Pinecone a critical component of the fast-growing $110B Generative AI market. Its vector database lets engineers work with data generated and consumed by Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI models, making it an essential infrastructure technology for building commercial AI products that are scalable, reliable, and accurate.

“The new wave of AI-powered applications create, store, and search through a large number of vector embeddings, which are AI representations of data,” said Edo Liberty, Founder & CEO of Pinecone. “We created Pinecone and the vector database category as a whole to let all AI developers easily work with a scalable and cost efficient database for this workload.”

The rise of generative AI has made Pinecone an integral part of the software stack for AI applications. In Q1 2023, the company saw a tremendous explosion in paying customers — such as Gong and Zapier — across all industries and sizes.

“The rise of AI is driving a fundamental shift in the way companies approach data management. In a very short amount of time, Pinecone has become a standard and critical component of the modern AI stack,” said Peter Levine, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We're thrilled to be partnering with Edo, Bob, and the rest of the team at Pinecone to support their vision of becoming the memory layer for AI applications.”

Pinecone's success is a testament to the growing demand for AI infrastructure and the company's ability to provide scalable solutions to the most pressing challenges in the field. With its innovative product, efficient growth engine, and world-class team, Pinecone is well-positioned to lead the next wave of AI-powered innovation.

“We're thrilled to have Andreessen Horowitz lead this round and to have the continued support of our existing investors,” said Bob Wiederhold, President of Pinecone. “With this funding, we will capitalize on our hypergrowth amidst the AI revolution transforming every line of business and even creating new ones, from AI search to AI chatbots to AI agents and beyond.”

To learn more about Pinecone, please visit pinecone.io.

About Pinecone

Pinecone created the vector database, which acts as the long-term memory for AI models and is a core infrastructure component for AI-powered applications. The managed service lets engineers build fast and scalable applications that use embeddings from AI models, and get them into production quickly. Pinecone is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, and others, and operates in San Francisco, New York, and Tel Aviv.


Source: Pinecone

AIwire