Vector database company Zilliz announced the completion of a new financing of $60 million, successfully expanding its Series B financing to $103 million. The financing was led by Prosperity7 Ventures, a diversified growth fund under Saudi Aramco Ventures. The old shareholders of Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Ventures, Wuyuan Capital and Yunqi Capital continued to raise investment, and Duowei Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor. . At present, Zilliz has completed a total of 113 million US dollars in financing.
According to the announcement, the financing will be used to further improve the construction of the R&D team and marketing team, accelerate the R&D and commercialization of Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed cloud service product, and continue to promote the global market layout.
"Zilliz is the pioneer of vector database technology and is committed to the development of vector database systems for AI production systems. Modern AI algorithms use feature vectors to represent the deep semantics of unstructured data, generating massive amounts of vector data. To efficiently process these data, Promoting the further large-scale application of AI requires a more subdivided and more specialized data infrastructure. Faced with this challenge, Zilliz invented the industry-leading cloud-native vector database technology, with a billion-scale vector data processing capability in milliseconds level."
"Milvus originated from an internal R&D project of Zilliz. In 2019, we made it open source. In 2020, the project joined the Linux Foundation's LF AI & Data Foundation for incubation, and graduated as a top-level project in 2021." Founder and CEO of Zilliz Star-Lord said, " Along the way, Milvus has accumulated thousands of enterprise users and developed into the world's most popular open source vector database. In the next stage, Zilliz will continue to serve as the main contributor and maintainer of the project for Milvus The open source community has contributed to the development, and will accelerate the development of a fully managed service for vector databases based on the public cloud, providing enterprise users with more secure, reliable, easy-to-use and low-cost cloud database solutions."
Zilliz Founder and CEO Star Lord
Following the creation of Milvus, an open source vector database, Zilliz announced the launch of Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed vector database service in the cloud, "to further empower enterprise AI applications and enjoy broad market prospects worldwide." The beta version of Zilliz Cloud is now live for invited users to experience it early .
The Zilliz team said that it will further improve and polish the vector database cloud service based on the feedback of test users, and strive to open it to all users as soon as possible. Zilliz Cloud is positioned as a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) based on public cloud, and aims to provide a one-stop solution for vector data processing, unstructured data analysis and enterprise AI application development.
Aysar Tayeb, Executive Managing Director of Prosperity7 Ventures, said: "As the main creative team of the Milvus project, Zilliz is a global leader in similarity search for massive data. We believe that Zilliz is fully capable of building a cloud platform based on Milvus. As Databricks and Based on the achievements made by data analysis platforms such as Snowflake in structured data, Zilliz will also provide its customers with new business insights, tap the potential value of unstructured data, and achieve remarkable business results. The total amount of unstructured data has been in the More than 4 times the total amount of structured data; and with the integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and the Internet of Things in the real world and the digital world, the proportion of unstructured data in the total global data will also further expand. "
In the past year, Zilliz has achieved numerous milestones in community building, product development and cutting-edge technology research:
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Continue to deepen the construction of Milvus open source community to achieve rapid user growth. The number of Milvus downloads exceeded the 1 million mark, tripled compared to the previous year; the number of production users tripled; the number of GitHub Stars doubled to over 11,000; the number of contributors doubled;
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Actively build a vector database ecosystem , developed and open-sourced the unstructured data ETL platform Towhee, which helps developers easily use AI models to extract feature vectors from various types of unstructured data, greatly shortening the development time of vector database applications;
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Won the BigANN Global Vector Search Challenge , further expanding the boundaries of vector search algorithms. The BigANN Challenge, held at the NeurIPS 2021 conference, is the first global competition dedicated to exploring innovative methods for billion-scale vector search;
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Leading the research and innovation in the field of database , the research results have been published in SIGMOD'21 and VLDB'22, the top conferences in the field of database.
According to the announcement, Zilliz has always been committed to database technology innovation in the cloud-native era, and will continue to develop a vector database service cloud platform for enterprise AI applications.
About Zilliz
Zilliz is a pioneer and global leader in the field of vector database systems, developing vector database systems for AI production systems. With the mission of exploring the value of unstructured data, Zilliz is committed to creating a new generation of database technology for AI applications, helping enterprises to easily develop AI applications. Zilliz's products can significantly reduce the cost of managing AI data infrastructure, helping AI technology empower more businesses, organizations and individuals.
Zilliz was founded in 2017 by former Oracle engineer Xingjue, and has received support from first-line investors such as Saudi Aramco's Prosperity 7 Capital, Temasek's Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Ventures, Wuyuan Capital, Yunqi Capital and Trustworthy Capital. Zilliz's technology and products are used by more than 1,000 companies worldwide and are widely used in computer vision, image retrieval, video analysis, natural language processing, recommendation systems, targeted advertising, personalized search, intelligent customer service, fraud detection, web areas such as safety and new drug discovery.
Kite Links
- GitHub: https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus
- Docs：https://milvus.io/docs
- Official website: https://milvus.io/
Towhee Links
- GitHub：https://github.com/towhee-io/towhee
- Docs：https://docs.towhee.io/
- Official website: https://towhee.io/