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a16z and Others Invest $100M in AI Startup Pinecone in Series B Funding
California-based AI startup, Pinecone has received a $100 million investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in its series B funding. The round also featured ICONIQ Growth, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital.
Following the investment, the company now has a market valuation of $750 million. With the investment, the vector database company will expand its team and improve its database further.
Gaining Ground
Pinecone creates vector databases that serve as long-term memory for AI models. These databases are a critical component of AI-powered applications. Since introducing its database in 2021, the firm has gained ground in the $110B Generative AI market.
In Q1 2023, the company saw increased adoption of its innovative technology across industries including consumer apps, e-commerce, fintech, insurance, media, and AI/ML. It also recorded an 8x growth in paid customers, including companies like Shopify, Gong, and Zapier.
A16z General Partner, Peter Levine, noted how critical Pinecone has become to maintaining the AI stack. He said:
“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Pinecone to support their vision of becoming the memory layer for AI applications.”
How AI Startup Pinecone Is Revolutionizing Machine Learning
While current Large Language models (LLM) have been known to give wrong responses factually based on the vector embeddings they search through, the vector database company seeks to change all that.
“We created Pinecone and the vector database category to let all AI developers easily work with a scalable and cost-efficient database for this workload,” said Edo Liberty, CEO of Pinecone. Consequently, Pinecone provides an external database where developers can store relevant data for their LLM apps. These data can then be drawn on to improve the quality of AI search results
The investment from a16z is a strong vote of confidence in Pinecone’s technology. With the new funds raised, Pinecone will expand its reach and offer its technology to a wider range of customers. The firm will also hope to build more products.
According to Bob Wiederhold, President of Pinecone, the startup “will capitalize on hypergrowth to transform every line of business and even create new ones, from AI search to AI chatbots and AI agents”.
a16z and Others Invest $100M in AI Startup Pinecone in Series B Funding
