Marqo – a startup enabling AI-powered search and discovery – announced it had closed US $ 5.2 million in seed investment. And the funding round – led by Blackbird Ventures – also includes the support of Creator Fund, January Capital, and Cohere’s co-founders, Ivan Zhang and Aidan Gomez. This funding round will be used to develop a new form of vector search technology that continuously improves based on user engagement, differentiating it from existing vector databases.
Marqo was launched by Jesse Clark, formerly Lead Scientist at Amazon Robotics AI and Principal Scientist at StitchFix, and physicist at Stanford and UCL, and Tom Hamer, a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) software engineer. And the team has since brought in AI, engineering, and operations expertise from Amazon, Uber, and Goldman Sachs.
Unlike traditional keyword searches, Marqo utilizes machine learning models to return more accurate search results by understanding the content and meaning. And users are able to search using text, images, or a combination of both. The technology initially targets end-user search (e-commerce, marketplaces) but has generative AI, analytics, and security applications. The new service, currently in closed beta, allows the machine learning models to automatically learn from user engagement and continuously improve the relevance of the vectors.
Marqo’s mission is to democratize AI technology allowing transformative search experiences to be built easily. And Marqo’s belief in democratizing AI technology fuels its decision to open-source the core Marqo code, meaning it is free and available for anyone to use.
For customers who want a solution optimized for production without any operational overheads, Marqo offers a fully managed, serverless Cloud Service. Following a highly successful early access program, the Cloud Service is now open to the public, allowing anyone to sign up and start using Marqo in a few clicks. The continuous-learning vector search service is expected to be released later this year as a part of Marqo Cloud.
KEY QUOTES:
“Search is in desperate need of modernisation – the vast majority of search experiences are based on legacy keyword search systems, which provide poor results. Customers want search experiences that anticipate their needs, not just match keywords. This is especially important for businesses where the search bar is the core product, such as ecommerce. By automatically improving based on user interaction, Marqo provides highly relevant results, and increases customer conversion rate, order value, and revenue.”
— Marqo’s co-founder, Tom Hamer
“Vector search is a huge growth area. In addition to being at the core of AI search and recommendation systems – vector search has become a must have component of generative AI. Marqo is instrumental in making AI useful to businesses by enabling developers to use the best technology with little effort.”
— Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere
“There is over 100 trillion gigabytes of data in the world, the majority of which is unstructured data such as text, images or video. With generative AI creating more content than ever before people, computers and companies need new ways to search. Marqo represents the next generation of search – hyper-relevant, AI-powered and based on human understanding. We are thrilled to be supporting this team!”
— Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker
“Despite many advantages, vector search remains challenging to implement especially for applications requiring real-time search. Vector search is rapidly becoming a must have for generative AI applications. We want anyone to be able to leverage the latest machine learning models, even if they’re not an expert in this field.”
— Jesse Clark, Marqo’s co-founder
