Weaviate builds an open-source, AI-native vector database that helps developers generate, store, and search embedding vectors and their corresponding objects. The company offers the Weaviate open source project and a managed Weaviate Cloud Service to remove operational overhead for users. Since its Series A in early 2022, Weaviate's open-source downloads have passed the 2 million mark, indicating strong adoption. Led by CEO Bob van Luijt, the company plans to use new funding to expand its team and accelerate development of both the open-source database and the cloud service. The product targets AI application developers who need scalable vector data management. The company is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. SeMI Technologies develops Weaviate, an open-source vector search engine that uses machine-learning-produced embeddings to enable semantic search and question-answering over unstructured data. Founded in 2019 by Bob van Luijt, Etienne Dilocker, and Micha Verhagen, the company positions Weaviate as an AI-first database to power search and recommendation systems in production. SeMI does not create the underlying models itself but integrates models from providers (e.g., Hugging Face or OpenAI) while offering tools, enterprise licenses, and managed services around the open-source core. Its software has been downloaded almost 750,000 times and has been growing roughly 30% per month; the company said downloads can correlate to enterprise license and managed-services sales. SeMI exhausted its seed funding and is now focused on scaling go-to-market, product development, and community growth, and beginning research where machine learning overlaps with computer science. Use cases span startups to medical applications and include demos such as genome vectorization and graph-embedding search.

Total raised

$66M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Apr 2023