Given its rapid advancement in recent months, AI has become the preeminent technology to watch, and one facet of the technology that uses machine learning to produce new content continues to make headlines: Generative AI.
Thanks to its ability to compose music and artwork, emulate celebrity voices and even write your med school homework assignments, Generative AI has become the hottest topic in tech in years, leading to the emergence of a $110 billion market that only continues to grow as developers further innovate with the technology.
Increasing AI’s long-term memory
One such innovation is the development of the “vector database,” a product created by Israeli start-up Pinecone, which enables AI models to more quickly and accurately pull information from the vast databases that they have access to, essentially working to increase their long-term memory.
Last week the company, currently valued at $750 million, closed a successful $100m. Series B funding round for its vector database technology, which lets engineers work with data generated and consumed by Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI models, making it an essential infrastructure technology for building commercial AI products that are scalable, reliable and accurate.
Bob Wiederhold, president of Pinecone, noted that the company intends to use the new funding to “capitalize on our hypergrowth amidst the AI revolution transforming every line of business and even creating new ones, from AI search to AI chatbots to AI agents and beyond.”
Edo Liberty, founder and CEO of Pinecone, noted that the company’s introduction of vector database technology in 2021 has benefited AI developers in the months since.
“The new wave of AI-powered applications create, store and search through a large number of vector embeddings, which are AI representations of data,” Liberty said. “We created Pinecone and the vector database category as a whole to let all AI developers easily work with a scalable and cost-efficient database for this workload.”
The funding round was led by leading global investor Andreessen Horowitz. General partner Peter Levine explained that the investment in Pinecone, given its proven utility in the AI development space, was a no-brainer.
“The rise of AI is driving a fundamental shift in the way companies approach data management. In a very short amount of time, Pinecone has become a standard and critical component of the modern AI stack,” said Levine. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Edo, Bob, and the rest of the team at Pinecone to support their vision of becoming the memory layer for AI applications.”
