LanceDB develops an open-source database and custom format (Lance Format) designed to support multimodal AI models that train on and generate images, video and text. The system is built on Apache Arrow and is optimized for large-scale multimodal training, exploration, search and analytics, with the ability to handle up to billions of vectors and petabytes of data. The company sells fully managed versions of its software with added features such as hardware acceleration and governance controls while continuing to maintain the open-source project. LanceDB reports around 600,000 downloads per month and counts customers including Midjourney, Character.ai, WeRide and Airtable. Co-founded by Chang She (formerly VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, and a co-creator of Pandas) and Lei Xu, the team emphasizes improving developer experience so AI teams can focus on models and business value.

Total raised

$8M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

May 2024