Pinecone Scores $28 Million Series A

<p><strong>SAN MATEO<&sol;strong> &&num;8212&semi; Pinecone Systems Inc&period;&comma; a search infrastructure company&comma; has completed a &dollar;28 million Series A funding round to allow companies of all sizes to power search applications with AI&period; The funding round was led by Menlo Ventures&comma; with participation from new investor Tiger Global and previous investors including Wing Venture Capital&comma; who led the company&&num;8217&semi;s seed-stage financing&period; Since coming out of stealth last year Pinecone has emerged as the leader of a new generation of search technology with thousands of developers signing up for their vector-database product&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;Search technology has revolved around keywords for hundreds of years&semi; books contained search indexes before the invention of the printing press&period; Amazingly&comma; today&&num;8217&semi;s predominant search infrastructure still works the same way&comma;&&num;8221&semi; said Edo Liberty&comma; Founder and CEO of Pinecone&period; &&num;8220&semi;Today&&num;8217&semi;s users expect more&period; They want search results that anticipate and understand their needs&comma; and not just match keywords&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The content stored in consumer and enterprise applications is only valuable if users can find it&period; Traditional keyword-based search systems struggle with complex data such as unstructured text&comma; user profiles&comma; or images&period; Yet complex data is only growing&comma; as are customers&&num;8217&semi; expectations&period; That puts pressure on engineering teams to modernize their search systems&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Recent advances in AI have led to an entirely new way of searching through data&period; Vector Search is focused on storing and searching through AI-generated representations of content&period; These AI-generated representations encapsulate the meaning of the original content in a machine-readable format&comma; and enable developers to build better search applications&period; Legacy systems were not designed to work like this&comma; so vector search requires a new kind of infrastructure called a vector database&period; With its vector database product&comma; Pinecone provides the search infrastructure for engineering teams to easily implement AI-powered search into their applications without the need to build their own or modify legacy infrastructure&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;Search is in desperate need of modernization&comma;&&num;8221&semi; continued Liberty&period; &&num;8220&semi;Machine learning has changed the way we interact with our data&comma; and those who don&&num;8217&semi;t react quickly enough will be left behind&period; The importance of vectors in search applications moving forward cannot be overstated&comma; and Pinecone has removed the huge infrastructural barrier that has prevented many companies from benefiting until now&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>As part of the announcement&comma; Tim Tully&comma; Partner at Menlo Ventures and former CTO of Splunk&comma; will join the board of directors&period; The addition of Tim&&num;8217&semi;s experience builds on the incredible team Pinecone has assembled over the last year&comma; including Peter Wagner &lpar;Founding Partner at Wing Venture Capital&rpar;&comma; Bob Wiederhold &lpar;former CEO of CouchBase&rpar;&comma; and Ram Sriharsha&comma; former Splunk VP of Engineering&comma; who joined the Pinecone team as VP of Engineering&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Pinecone&&num;8217&semi;s vector database already has thousands of users&comma; with customers across a wide spectrum of industries including enterprise software&comma; social media platforms&comma; search engines&comma; ecommerce&comma; and AI&sol;ML products&period; It is being used by companies ranging from small startups to enterprises&comma; handling data ranging anywhere from hundreds of thousands to billions of items&period; The company has offices in New York and Tel Aviv&comma; as well as some working remotely&period; Pinecone will utilize the funding to grow out its product&comma; customer success&comma; and R&&num;038&semi;D teams&comma; and will invest in core research on machine learning &lpar;ML&rpar;&comma; information retrieval &lpar;IR&rpar;&comma; and natural language processing &lpar;NLP&rpar;&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;