Chroma

Chroma is an open-source vector database company founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was co-founded by Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov to provide developers with a simple, embeddable database for storing, querying, and managing vector embeddings used in AI applications.

Chroma's primary product is its eponymous open-source vector database, which allows developers to store document embeddings alongside metadata and query them by semantic similarity. It is commonly used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, enabling large language model applications to retrieve relevant context from external data sources. The database can run embedded within a Python or JavaScript application or as a standalone server, and it has gained adoption among developers building LLM-powered tools.

Chroma raised an $18 million seed round in 2023, with participation from investors including Astasia Myers of Quiet Capital and others. The company operates with a small team and distributes its core product under an open-source license, with the GitHub repository accumulating significant developer interest since its public release in early 2023.