Pinecone Hits $750M Valuation As AI Heats Up Vector Database Market

While generative AI applications have been grabbing most of the fundraising headlines recently, some aspects of the infrastructure underneath those applications are starting to get investors’ attention.

New York-based vector database startup Pinecone is the latest, raising a $100 million Series B at a $750 million valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Iconiq Growth and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.

The company’s vector database allows engineers to work with data generated by large language models and other AI-related models. Vector databases are easily searchable and offer the flexibility engineers need when creating commercial AI applications.

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“The new wave of AI-powered applications create, store and search through a large number of vector embeddings, which are AI representations of data,” said founder and CEO Edo Liberty in a release. “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.”

Building AI

Investors can’t get enough of all things AI right now.

Although generative AI startups like Character.ai, Adept AI and Anthropic receive most of the attention, the underlying pipes that are needed to build those applications also seem to be seeing some investments.

Last week, New Jersey-based CoreWeave locked up a $221 million investment led by Magnetar Capital. The specialized cloud provider offers flexible cloud infrastructure with better processing, which will be needed to train LLMs for AI.

There also likely will be increased investment in semiconductor startups as the AI explosion continues. New chips with better processing also will be needed to train those LLMs.

Founded in 2019, Pinecone has now raised $138 million, per Crunchbase data.