- Pinecone — a machine learning cloud infrastructure company — recently left stealth with $10 million in seed funding. These are the details.
Pinecone — a machine learning cloud infrastructure company — recently left stealth with $10 million in seed funding. And the investment was led by Wing Venture Capital, and Wing’s Founding Partner, Peter Wagner, will be joining the Pinecone board. Launched by the team behind Amazon SageMaker and founded by scientist and former AWS Director Edo Liberty, Pinecone makes large-scale real-time inference as simple as querying a database. And it is available for self-onboarding now.
Pinecone builds infrastructure for enabling the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the cloud. And the company’s vector database supports large scale production deployments of real-time applications like personalization, semantic text search, image retrieval, data fusion, deduplication, recommendation, and anomaly detection. Plus each of these is a multi-billion dollar market today and projected to grow 30%+ YoY for the foreseeable future as more and more companies adopt ML technologies.
Modern ML and AI use vectors (aka embeddings) for representing data like documents, videos, and user behaviors. And applications that need to accurately filter and rank large collections of such vectors in real time require a highly specialized data infrastructure.
Existing databases or search engines are not a good fit as they are designed for tables and documents, not vectors. And in-house systems that use open source libraries are expensive to build and hard to maintain. This forces developers to constantly compromise between speed, accuracy, stability, and scale.
With Pinecone’s unique vector database, ML and data infrastructure engineers can dynamically transform and index billions of high-dimensional vectors. And they can answer queries like nearest neighbor and max-dot-product search accurately and in milliseconds.
Pinecone’s database is 100% serverless and API-driven — which means customers always have the computing resources they need, when they need them, without having to worry about infrastructure or maintenance. And simple self-onboarding and consumption-based pricing let companies build proofs of concept with very little overhead and then scale effortlessly.
One of the largest retailers in the world reports using Pinecone to serve real-time shopping recommendations based on their own deep learning models. And they saw an immediate 18.5% lift in revenue per recommendation compared with their previous solution.
KEY QUOTES:
“Visionary leaders in many companies are working hard to transform their business with machine learning. Pinecone gives them technology they need which, until today, was reserved to a few tech giants.”
— Edo Liberty, Founder and CEO of Pinecone
“The modern Enterprise is built on data and powered by AI. The Data Cloud has emerged as its foundation with the ascendance of Snowflake. Pinecone is poised to unleash data teams and their ML-based applications in a similar fashion.”
— Peter Wagner, Founding Partner, Wing Venture Capital.
