Pinecone builds a managed vector database that enables AI-driven semantic search and acts as long-term memory for LLMs. Since launching in 2021, it has grown from a handful of customers to about 1,500, including Shopify, Gong and Zapier. The company emphasizes flexibility and GDPR-friendly data deletion compared with baking data into LLMs. Pinecone is about 100 employees today and plans to expand to roughly 150–200 by year-end using its new capital runway. Its product is positioned to integrate with LLMs to reduce hallucinations and serve as a source of truth for AI applications. Financially, the company just announced a $100M Series B at a $750M post valuation, bringing total capital raised to $138M. Pinecone builds a purpose-built, serverless vector database aimed at data scientists. The company is refining its focus toward AI-driven search and information retrieval use cases such as discovery, recommendation, and anomaly detection. Its system is organized into pods; Pinecone offers a free single pod for proof-of-concept and charges customers based on pod usage and monthly spend. It launched a production paid service in October and founder Edo Liberty says adoption and revenue have been growing rapidly since then. Liberty says the system is designed to scale to billions of objects and removes provisioning concerns for customers via its serverless model. The company previously raised a $10M seed and had about 10 employees at that time; Liberty expects to double staff in the next year. Pinecone also reports progress on diversity, with 50% of new technical hires this year being female. Pinecone builds a purpose-built vector database that converts data into high-dimensional vectors and indexes them for efficient similarity search. Its product comprises three components: a vector engine that indexes and searches high-dimensional vector data, a cloud-hosted system that applies converted data to models and handles index lookups and pre- and post-processing, and a management layer to track data and transfers. The company came out of stealth alongside its product announcement and says it aims to make vector-based workflows accessible beyond the largest tech firms. Pinecone was founded by Edo Liberty and other team members who helped launch Amazon SageMaker. The startup has about 10 employees and plans to double or triple headcount depending on how the year goes. Pinecone announced a $10 million seed round led by Wing Venture Capital.

Total raised

$138M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Apr 2023