Pinecone is a company that builds a managed vector database, the storage and search layer for the embedding vectors that power semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation. It was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty, who had previously led research teams at Yahoo and at AWS, where he worked on Amazon SageMaker. The founding idea was to take the approximate nearest-neighbor search techniques used inside large companies and offer them to any developer as a hosted service.
Pinecone announced its vector database and a $10 million seed round, led by Wing Venture Capital, in a blog post dated January 27, 2021, launching it as a public beta. The product is described as “a managed database for working with vectors,” handling storage, indexing, querying, and operational scaling behind a simple API so teams do not run their own search infrastructure. The company later raised a $100 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Why business readers should care: Pinecone helped define the vector-database category that sits underneath most “chat with your documents” products. Choosing a managed service like Pinecone trades infrastructure control for speed of delivery, and the same private content that gets embedded and stored there becomes a data-governance surface that must be secured like any other sensitive store.