Chroma

Chroma is the open-source, developer-first embedding database that became the default starting point for building LLM applications. Founded in 2022 by Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov and headquartered in San Francisco, Chroma is designed to make knowledge and memory pluggable for AI apps: a few lines of Python or JavaScript give developers embeddings storage, vector search, full-text search, metadata filtering, and multi-modal retrieval, with a lightweight local mode for prototyping that scales to a hosted cloud.

Its tight fit with the LangChain and LlamaIndex ecosystems made it ubiquitous in early RAG tutorials and prototypes. Chroma has raised about $20.3 million, led by an $18 million seed round from Quiet Capital with angels including Naval Ravikant, Jack and Max Altman, and Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, at a $75 million valuation.

Choose Chroma when developer experience and fast prototyping are the priority.