Peter Levine, who is leading today’s investment for Andreessen Horowitz and will be joining the Pinecone board, sees the vector database as a key piece of the AI stack. If you have to delete a record, it’s fairly trivial to do in a database, but it’s much more difficult to remove bad data from a model because of the way it’s structured. He points to GDPR compliance as an example. “This whole knowledge management scheme ends up being a lot more flexible, a lot more efficient, a lot easier to operate ,” he says. While both take large amounts of data and let you search on them, with an LLM the data is baked into the model, and therefore less flexible, while the vector database is built for semantic search, but has the flexibility of a database. He says interest in LLMs is driving interest in the vector database, but it’s a different proposition. And so you have to accelerate the building of those capacities, and that’s very expensive and very hard,” he said. “This is like consumer-based adoption of B2B deep tech stuff. The company is seeing interest from businesses of all sizes, including technology companies like Shopify, Gong and Zapier. That first-to-market advantage is helping them grow from a handful of customers last year to 1,500 today, and Liberty says the growth rate is more like a consumer tool than a highly technical database. And so it’s very easy to bet on the leader of a category that is already formed,” Liberty told TechCrunch. Now of course, this is a well-formed market and the category has different players, and so incumbents and clouds and so on, and we’re clearly ahead. When we came out with this, with the vector database category, nobody knew what the hell we’re talking about. “We are clearly the creators of this category and the leaders in it. These kinds of numbers have been hard to come by in a conservative investment environment, but the company is growing fast and investors saw an opportunity to grab a market leader, says Pinecone CEO and founder Edo Liberty. Today, the company announced a $100 million Series B investment on a $750 million post valuation. With the rise of LLMs in the public consciousness, companies are beginning to see the value of vector databases even more. But as the use cases began to take shape last year, the company began pushing AI-driven semantic search. When Pinecone launched a vector database aimed at data scientists in 2021, it was probably ahead of its time.
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