Pinecone

Pinecone is a company developing a fully managed, cloud-native vector database, simplifying adding vector search to production applications and providing long-term memory for AI applications. Large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and semantic search rely on vector embeddings that traditional scalar-based databases struggle with. Pinecone offers features from traditional databases with the enhanced performance of vector indexes for improved storage and querying capabilities. It combines vector search libraries and advanced features, such as filtering and distributed infrastructure, to provide a high-performance database even with billions of items. Vector search using Pinecone has a number of use cases across search, generative AI, security, personalization, analytics, machine learning, and data management.

The B2B company was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty. Pinecone is currently active and is headquartered in New York, with additional locations in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. Pinecone first launched its vector database as a public beta on January 27, 2021. The company's CEO is Edo Liberty, and Ram Sriharsha serves as the CTO. Pinecone has raised a total funding of $138,000,000, with its last funding type being a Series B round. The company's last funded date was on April 27, 2023, with an amount raised of $100,000,000. This funding brought Pinecone's valuation to $750M. Notable investors in Pinecone include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), ICONIQ Capital, Menlo Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, and Tiger Global Management. Pinecone operates in a competitive market, featuring companies such as Cognitive Code, Elastic, Supabase, Zilliz, Materialize, Elisity, Bit.io, Qdrant, and Weaviate .

Pinecone indexes store records using vector data. Each index contains a unique ID and an array of floats that represent a dense vector embedding. Each record may also contain a sparse vector embedding for hybrid search and metadata key-value pairs for filtered queries.

Pinecone record data.

Each index contains at least one pod—units of cloud resources (vCPU, RAM, disk, etc.) that provide storage and compute for each index. Pinecone offers a number of pod types, with each step up in size doubling the space available for vectors.

Pinecone integrates with a number of commonly used products in the AI tech stack, including the following:

• OpenAI
• Cohere
• Elastic
• Databricks
• Hugging Face
• LangChain
• GPT Index
• Deepset (Haystack)

The company is a technology partner of Cohere, Deepset, and OpenAI, working with them to serve their customer bases via Pinecone integrations.

The company offers a free "Starter" that is limited to one index and one project for small applications, and two paid plans, "Standard" and "Enterprise." For each index, Pinecone bills hourly by determining the per-hour-price of a pod multiplied by the number of pods the index uses.