Pinecone

Pinecone is the company that popularised the managed vector database and remains the best-known commercial name in the category. Founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty — former director of research at AWS and head of Amazon AI Labs — and headquartered in New York City, Pinecone pioneered the fully managed, serverless vector database: developers send embeddings and queries through a simple API while Pinecone handles indexing, scaling, and low-latency search behind the scenes.

Its 2024 serverless re-architecture decoupled storage from compute to cut costs at scale, and the platform now serves more than 20,000 organisations building RAG, semantic search, and recommendation systems. Pinecone has raised about $138 million in total, including a $100 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $750 million valuation, with Menlo Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, and Wing Venture Capital.

Choose Pinecone when you want a production-ready, fully managed vector database with minimal operational overhead.