Sunnyvale, California - Pinecone Systems Inc., a machine learning (ML) cloud infrastructure company, left stealth today with $10 million in seed funding. The investment was led by Wing Venture Capital, and Wing’s Founding Partner, Peter Wagner, will be joining the Pinecone board. Built by the team behind Amazon SageMaker and founded by scientist and former AWS Director Edo Liberty, Pinecone makes large-scale real-time inference as simple as querying a database. It is available for self-onboarding today.
Pinecone builds infrastructure to enable the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the cloud. The company’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 more and more companies adopt ML technologies.
Modern ML and AI use vectors (aka embeddings) to represent data such as documents, videos, and user behaviors. Applications that need to accurately filter and rank large collections of such vectors in real time require a highly specialized data infrastructure. Existing databases or search engines aren’t a good fit; they are designed for tables and documents, not vectors. In-house systems that use open source libraries are expensive to build and hard to maintain. This forces developers to constantly compromise between speed, accuracy, stability, and scale.
