Weaviate

About Weaviate

Products by Weaviate

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

WeaviateAI Search & Knowledge

Open-source vector database for AI-native applications

From $458.1/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Weaviate

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Weaviate's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.6 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

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

Competitive Landscape

Who Weaviate competes with, and how they differ.

Qdrant8.0/10

Qdrant is a Rust-built, open-source vector database with a narrower, performance-first scope than Weaviate's broader AI-native platform (hybrid search, generative modules, the Engram memory layer); both ship open-source self-host plus a managed cloud tier.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Pinecone8.2/10

Pinecone is a fully managed, closed-source vector database with no self-hosted option, targeting teams that want infrastructure-as-a-service, versus Weaviate's open-source-first model that supports self-hosting or managed cloud.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Chroma8.1/10

Chroma is a lightweight, developer-first open-source embedding database aimed at prototyping and small-to-mid-scale RAG apps, without Weaviate's clustering, hybrid search, and multi-tenant production tooling.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Elastic7.5/10

Elastic added vector (kNN/HNSW) search onto its mature Elasticsearch engine, competing on breadth — logs, text search and vectors in one platform — rather than Weaviate's vector-native architecture built specifically for embeddings and RAG.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

M

Milvus (Zilliz)

Milvus, built by Zilliz, is an open-source vector database engineered for billion-scale similarity search on a distributed, Kubernetes-native architecture; Zilliz Cloud is its managed counterpart, competing with Weaviate primarily on raw scale rather than integrated hybrid search or agent memory.

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Weaviate's history, with sources.

1. Jun 3, 2026Launch

   Engram launches as generally available

   Weaviate's managed memory and context service for agentic applications, Engram, reached general availability, converting raw agent events into structured, durable, scoped memories across sessions.

   weaviate.io
2. Apr 21, 2023Funding

   Series B — $50M led by Index Ventures

   Weaviate raised a $50 million Series B led by Index Ventures, with Battery Ventures, NEA, Cortical Ventures, Zetta Venture Partners and ING Ventures participating, to expand the open-source database and Weaviate Cloud Service.

   prnewswire.com
3. Jan 18, 2023Milestone

   SeMI Technologies rebrands as Weaviate

   The company changed its legal and public name from SeMI Technologies to Weaviate B.V., aligning the corporate identity with its better-known open-source vector database product.

   prnewswire.com
4. Feb 22, 2022Funding

   Series A — $16M co-led by NEA and Cortical Ventures

   SeMI Technologies (later renamed Weaviate) closed a $16 million Series A financing co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Cortical Ventures to grow its open-source vector search database.

   prnewswire.com
5. August 2020Funding

   Seed round — $1.6M led by Zetta Venture Partners

   SeMI Technologies raised a previously unannounced $1.6 million seed round led by Zetta Venture Partners with participation from ING Ventures, disclosed retroactively alongside the 2022 Series A announcement.

   prnewswire.com
6. Jul 1, 2019Founded

   Founded as SeMI Technologies in Amsterdam

   Bob van Luijt, Etienne Dilocker and Micha Verhagen founded SeMI Technologies, the company behind the open-source Weaviate vector database, in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

   ricoh.com