Zilliz, a company with global operations delivering vector databases, has secured a $60 million extension to its initial $43 million Series B. The financing was headed by Prosperity7 Ventures, a diverse growth fund inside Aramco Ventures, with previous investors Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, and Yunqi Capital also participating. The entire amount invested in the business now stands at $113 million.
Zilliz will use this infusion of cash to grow both its engineering and go-to-market teams after establishing its Silicon Valley headquarters. As a result, Zilliz would be able to strengthen its ongoing dedication to open source and improve its managed cloud service.
For AI applications, Zilliz creates high-performance vector database management solutions. In order to handle and analyze unstructured data at scale, modern AI algorithms employ feature vectors to express the deep semantics of the data. With a vector database that can process billion-scale vector data in milliseconds and is cloud native, Zilliz claims to be at the forefront of this endeavor.
“Zilliz’s journey to this point started with the creation of Milvus, an open-source vector database that eventually joined the LF AI & Data Foundation as a top-level project,” said Charles Xie, Founder and CEO of Zilliz. “Milvus has now become the world’s most popular open-source vector database with over a thousand end-users. We will continue to serve as a primary contributor and committer to Milvus and deliver on our promise to provide a fully managed vector database service on public cloud with the security, reliability, ease of use, and affordability that enterprises require.”
Early Access
Before being more widely accessible, the company’s fully managed product is now in private preview for early access on Zilliz Cloud and is accessible by invitation to clients for testing and feedback. Long-term goals for Zilliz Cloud include becoming a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that offers an integrated platform for enterprise AI application development, vector data processing, and unstructured data analytics.
“With its leadership on Milvus, Zilliz is a global leader in vector similarity search on massive amounts of unstructured data,” said Aysar Tayeb, Executive Managing Director of Prosperity7 Ventures. “We believe that the company is in a strong position to build a cloud platform around Milvus that will unleash new and powerful business insights and outcomes for its customers, just as data analytics platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have done with structured data. There is already over 4x more unstructured data than structured data, a gap that will continue to grow as AI, robotics, IoT, and other technologies meld the digital and physical realms.”
