Israeli-American AI startup, Pinecone Systems, is set to supercharge Generative AI on Microsoft Azure, promising a new era of speed and accuracy for Azure and Azure OpenAI Service customers.
The vector database creator made the announcement last week during its "AI Transformation Summit," a collaborative event with Microsoft. The move will enable Azure customers to leverage Pinecone's vector database, which is closer to their data and applications, thereby facilitating faster, more accurate, and secure Generative AI applications.
Pinecone's vector database is a critical part of the AI technical stack. It addresses one of the most significant challenges in deploying Generative AI solutions — hallucinations — by enabling companies to store, search, and find the most relevant and up-to-date information from their data. This information is then sent to Large Language Models (LLMs) with every query, ensuring relevant, accurate, and fast responses from search or Generative AI applications.
Pinecone prides itself on offering effortless operations. Customers simply choose a cloud region and Pinecone handles the rest, providing enterprise-level support, reliability, and security. The service scales with zero effort and zero downtime, supporting billions of vectors and up to thousands of queries per second without interrupting application operations. It's fully managed, supporting AWS, GCP, and Azure, and is secure by design, being GDPR-ready and SOC2 Type II certified.
The partnership also means that Pinecone customers can now choose to run the managed service across all three major cloud providers. Pinecone also offers low operational costs, with transparent, resource-based pricing that puts customers in control. Users can easily monitor usage and streamline procurement through cloud marketplaces.
In April this year, the startup raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $750 million valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from ICONIQ Growth, Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.
The startup's journey began in Sunnyvale when it emerged from stealth mode in January 2021 with $10 million in seed funding, covered by StartupHub.ai. The round was led by Wing Venture Capital, whose Founding Partner, Peter Wagner, joined the Pinecone board. The startup was built by the team behind Amazon SageMaker and was founded by scientist and former AWS Director Edo Liberty. Pinecone's original mission was to make large-scale real-time inference as simple as querying a database.
The startup's vector database supports large scale production deployments of real-time applications such as personalization, semantic text search, image retrieval, data fusion, deduplication, recommendation, and anomaly detection. Each of these is a multi-billion dollar market today and projected to grow over 30% year-over-year, for the foreseeable future as increasingly more companies adopt ML technologies and attempt to train their own LLMs.
Pinecone's strength lies in its ease of use, requiring a few clicks to be up and running, taking advantage of the extensive developer library to jumpstart building and integrations to connect their stack. It's compatible with embeddings from any AI model or LLM, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, and Google.
Azure regions in Pinecone will be available for private preview by July 31, 2023, with early access registrations open here.
