Zilliz

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus, the most widely deployed open-source vector database in the world. Founded in 2017 by Charles Xie (a former Oracle engineer) and now headquartered in Redwood City, California, Zilliz created Milvus as a purpose-built, cloud-native engine for billion-scale vector search and donated it to the LF AI & Data Foundation, where it has grown past 40,000 GitHub stars and powers more than 10,000 enterprise deployments — including NVIDIA, Salesforce, eBay, Airbnb, and DoorDash.

The 2025 Milvus 2.5 release added native hybrid search, unifying lexical and semantic retrieval in a single engine. The company commercialises the project through Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed service.

Zilliz has raised roughly $113 million, including a Series B extension led by Prosperity7 Ventures, with Temasek's Pavilion Capital and Hillhouse among its backers. Choose Zilliz/Milvus for open-source flexibility and proven performance at very large scale.