Pinecone Systems Inc.
Headquarters
New York, NYFounded
2019CEO / Founder
Edo LibertyEmployees
201-500Funding
Series C — $138MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.2/10Website
pinecone.io/
Profile updated
About Pinecone Systems Inc.
Pinecone Systems Inc. is a cloud-native vector database company headquartered in New York, NY, founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty, a former head of Amazon AI Labs. The company provides a managed vector database service that allows developers to store and query high-dimensional vector embeddings generated by machine learning models, without managing underlying infrastructure.
Pinecone's primary product is its serverless vector database, which supports use cases such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, and recommendation systems. The platform is used by engineering teams building AI-powered applications that require fast approximate nearest-neighbor search at scale. Pinecone integrates with major AI frameworks and model providers including OpenAI, Hugging Face, and LangChain.
The company raised a $100 million Series B round in April 2023 at a $750 million valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, following earlier rounds that brought total funding to approximately $138 million. Pinecone employs roughly 200-400 people. The company introduced a serverless pricing tier in early 2024, shifting from pod-based infrastructure to a consumption-based model.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Pinecone Systems Inc.
All products by Pinecone Systems Inc. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Pinecone Systems Inc.
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Pinecone Systems Inc.'s product on their own terms. They landed within 0.8 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Pinecone Systems Inc. competes with, and how they differ.
Open-source vector database with a self-hostable option alongside its managed cloud, appealing to teams wanting more infrastructure control than Pinecone's fully closed serverless model.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Open-source, developer-first embedding database aimed at smaller-scale and prototyping use cases, with a lighter-weight footprint than Pinecone's enterprise-grade managed service.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Established search and analytics platform that added vector search capabilities to its existing Elasticsearch stack, targeting enterprises already invested in Elastic for logging and full-text search rather than AI-native vector workloads.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedManaged cloud version of the open-source Milvus vector database, competing directly on large-scale, high-performance vector search with a more open, self-hostable architecture than Pinecone.
Vector search bolted onto MongoDB's general-purpose document database, targeting existing MongoDB customers who want to add semantic search without adopting a separate specialized vector database.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Enterprise search and personalization platform sold as a business application layer for e-commerce and support use cases, rather than a raw infrastructure component like Pinecone.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Pinecone Systems Inc.'s history, with sources.
- Milestone
Leadership transition: Ash Ashutosh named CEO, founder Edo Liberty becomes Chief Scientist
Pinecone appointed Ash Ashutosh, a former Google data-infrastructure sales leader and founder of Actifio (acquired by Google in 2020), as CEO. Founder Edo Liberty moved to Chief Scientist to focus on the company's research direction after six years as CEO.
pinecone.io - Launch
Pinecone Serverless reaches general availability on GCP and Azure
Pinecone Serverless became generally available on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, extending its serverless architecture beyond the initial AWS-only launch.
pinecone.io - Launch
Pinecone Serverless reaches general availability on AWS
Pinecone Serverless exited public preview and became generally available on AWS after roughly four months of testing by more than 20,000 organizations; the company reported 5,000+ customers at the time, including Gong, Help Scout, New Relic and Notion.
techcrunch.com - Launch
Pinecone Serverless unveiled in public preview
Pinecone introduced a new serverless architecture that separates reads, writes, storage and indexing onto a multi-tenant compute layer, claiming a 10x-100x cost reduction versus its prior pod-based service.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series B -- $100M led by Andreessen Horowitz at $750M valuation
Pinecone raised a $100 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz (Peter Levine joined the board), with ICONIQ Growth and existing investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital participating, valuing the company at $750 million post-money.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series A -- $28M led by Menlo Ventures
Pinecone closed a $28 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with new investor Tiger Global and existing seed investor Wing Venture Capital participating, bringing total raised to $38 million.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Seed -- $10M led by Wing Venture Capital
Pinecone raised a $10 million seed round led by Wing Venture Capital to build a purpose-built vector database for machine learning applications; the company had 10 employees at the time.
techcrunch.com - Founded
Pinecone founded by Edo Liberty
Edo Liberty founded Pinecone in 2019 after leading Amazon's AI research lab (Director of Research at AWS, Head of Amazon AI Labs).
venturebeat.com
Explore AI Software Reviews
Browse multi-perspective AI panel reviews across hundreds of AI tools, agents, and platforms. Find the right software with insights from all six expert seats — Decision Maker, Domain Strategist, Finance Lead, Domain Practitioner, Power User, and Skeptic.