Chroma

About Chroma

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Chroma

All products by Chroma reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

ChromaAI Search & Knowledge

Open-source vector database for AI applications

From $250/mo8.0/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Chroma

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Chroma's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.4 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Chroma competes with, and how they differ.

Pinecone8.2/10

Pinecone is a fully managed, closed-source vector database with no self-hosted option, targeting production RAG at scale on proprietary serverless infrastructure, versus Chroma's open-source, self-hostable-first model.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Weaviate8.1/10

Weaviate is an open-source vector database written in Go with built-in hybrid search and a GraphQL/REST API, competing directly with Chroma for self-hosted RAG deployments but with a heavier operational footprint in its distributed cluster mode.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Qdrant8.0/10

Qdrant is a Rust-built open-source vector database focused on high-performance filtered search and a low memory footprint, competing with Chroma's own Rust-rewritten core for the same self-hosted developer segment.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

MongoDB Atlas Vector Search8.4/10

MongoDB Atlas Vector Search bolts vector indexing onto an existing general-purpose document database, appealing to teams that want to add embeddings to data they already store in MongoDB rather than adopt a purpose-built vector store like Chroma.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

M

Milvus (Zilliz)

Milvus, commercialized by Zilliz, is an open-source, Kubernetes-native vector database built for billion-scale distributed deployments from day one — a heavier-weight alternative to Chroma's single-node-to-cloud embedded model.

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Chroma's history, with sources.

1. Aug 18, 2025Launch

   Chroma Cloud reaches general availability

   Chroma launched Chroma Cloud, a fully managed serverless deployment of its database built on a distributed Rust engine (Chroma Distributed) running on object storage across AWS and GCP, supporting vector, full-text (BM25), and metadata search.

   trychroma.com
2. Apr 3, 2025Milestone

   Chroma 1.0 released — Rust rewrite, ~4x faster

   Chroma shipped v1.0, a full rewrite of its core engine from Python to Rust that removed the GIL bottleneck and delivered roughly 3-5x faster writes and queries, forming the shared foundation for local and cloud deployments.

   github.com
3. Apr 7, 2023Funding

   Seed round — $18M led by Quiet Capital

   Chroma raised an $18 million seed round led by Astasia Myers of Quiet Capital, with angel participation from Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch, and executives from Hugging Face, MongoDB, and Notion. The post also disclosed a previously unannounced 2022 pre-seed round.

   trychroma.com
4. Feb 15, 2023Launch

   Open-source Chroma v0.1.0 released

   Chroma published its first tagged open-source release (v0.1.0) of its AI-native embedding database on GitHub, licensed Apache 2.0.

   github.com
5. May 2022Funding

   Pre-seed round led by AIX Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and AI Grant

   Chroma closed a pre-seed round led by Anthony Goldbloom (AIX Ventures), with participation from James Cham (Bloomberg Beta) and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (AI Grant). The round was disclosed retroactively alongside the April 2023 seed announcement.

   trychroma.com
6. 2022Founded

   Chroma founded in San Francisco

   Chroma was founded by Jeff Huber (CEO) and Anton Troynikov (CTO) to build an AI-native, developer-first embedding database for retrieval-augmented generation applications.

   tracxn.com