Pinecone
Vector database company founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty. Built a managed vector database for retrieval-augmented generation systems. $750M valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. NYC HQ with significant Israeli engineering operations.
Pinecone is a vector database company founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty, who previously led research at Amazon AI Labs and Yahoo Research. The company is headquartered in New York with substantial engineering operations in Israel.
Pinecone built a managed vector database — a database optimized for similarity search across high-dimensional embeddings — that became one of the foundational infrastructure layers for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Vector databases became commercially essential after the 2022–2023 generative AI cycle, when application developers needed to give LLMs external memory and grounding.
The company raised a Series B at a $750 million valuation in 2023 led by Andreessen Horowitz. Pinecone competes with Weaviate, Chroma, Qdrant, and Milvus in the vector-database category and with Postgres extensions (pgvector) and search platforms (Elastic, OpenSearch) on the adjacent boundaries of the market.