Amsterdam-based Weaviate raises $50M in Series B funding round to expand team and further develop open source database and cloud services to meet demand from AI application development market .
“The Weaviate vector database is being used as the core infrastructure for the emerging AI-native ecosystem,” said Bob van Luijt, CEO and co-founder of Weaviate. “This will enable users from startups to large enterprises to create a new wave of applications, from custom-made search and recommendation systems to his ChatGPT plugin.”
Weaviate AI native vector database simplifies vector data management for AI developers, solving the difficult problem of generating, storing, and retrieving embedded vectors and their corresponding objects.
Its cloud service allows developers to leverage the full functionality of the Weaviate database without any operational overhead. And in February, he announced that developers could easily harness the power of large-scale language models (LLMs) like his GPT-4 and human-like ability to understand and respond to queries in natural language. Introduced generative search support to
“Weaviate’s vector database and search engine provide critical infrastructure to facilitate the migration of AI platforms at scale,” said Erin Price-Wright, partner at Index Ventures. “The pace of adoption across companies and AI-native startups using Weaviate to develop multimodal search, recommendation, and generative applications is staggering. It’s a great product and we’re excited to partner with them to help drive the next phase of growth.”
The funding round was led by Index Ventures and includes Battery Ventures and existing investors NEA, Cortical Ventures, Zetta Venture Partners and ING Ventures.
Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, said: “Just as Elastic and MongoDB helped enterprises leverage untabular data, Weaviate is leading the vector database revolution, providing a key tool for storing, indexing and searching unstructured data through vector embedding. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the Weaviate team to help the company improve its go-to-market program, especially in the US. “
