Zilliz builds cloud-native software to process unstructured data for AI applications and is the creator of Milvus, a popular open-source vector database for similarity searches. Milvus downloads have passed 1 million, production users grew 300% year-over-year, GitHub stargazers exceed 11,000, and contributors have doubled. Customers include eBay, Tencent, Walmart, Ikea, Intuit and Compass. Zilliz is expanding its product roadmap with a Zilliz Cloud managed service in private preview and Towhee, an open-source vector data ETL framework. The company has relocated its headquarters to San Francisco to pursue growth in the U.S. market after building initially in Shanghai. Financially, Zilliz has raised a $60M extension to its Series B, bringing total capital raised to $113M. Zilliz builds Milvus, an open-source platform for processing unstructured data. The company was founded by Charles Xie (formerly a software engineer at Oracle) and set out in Shanghai with a global ambition. Milvus has been starred more than 4,440 times on GitHub and attracted roughly 120 contributors and about 400 enterprise users, half outside China. Zilliz plans to relocate its headquarters to Silicon Valley within the next 12 months and will deploy new capital into overseas recruitment, expanding its open-source ecosystem, and R&D for cloud-based products and services. Management expects those cloud products and services to become the company’s revenue driver as it begins monetizing in the second half of 2021. The company is three years old and has positioned itself to scale internationally from China’s large unstructured-data market. Zilliz develops a new generation of OLAP database systems that leverage GPU hardware acceleration, with its core product MegaWise. MegaWise is claimed to improve query performance by more than 100× while reducing hardware and operational costs by over 10× compared with traditional analytical databases. Launched in 2016 by Charles Xie, the company targets multiple industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare and retail. Over its first two years the company signed strategic partnerships with NVIDIA, IBM, Google and Inspur. In January 2018 Zilliz completed a $10M Series A1 financing to support its plans. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate product R&D and further promote commercialization of GPU databases.

Total raised

$113M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Aug 2022