Vector database Chroma recently closed an impressive $18 million seed round lead by Quiet Capital at a $75 million valuation. The round also included angel investors like Naval Ravikant, Sam Altman’s brothers Max and Jack Altman, Guillermo Rauch, and Jordan Tigani. It follows their successful $2.3 million pre-seed round last year led by AIX Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, AI Grant, and Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad.
Behind the bustling venture lies the duo of Anton Troynikov, who returned from Germany upon graduations from graduate school in 2018, and Jeff Huber, a budding entrepreneur. After Troynikov’s emails to computer vision and robotics founders, the two eventually joined forces to create Chroma.
Chroma is an open source vector database offering tools that assist developers building AI projects. While embracing a versatile approach, the startup narrows its focus into aiding developers working on generative AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. For example, Chroma helps developers create a “ChatGPT” for their documents or specific data. It allows users to plug in vector embeddings, or representations of data in terms of numbers and dimensions, pairing data together to help create AI models. It also limits the context window for AI models, helping to prevent the appearance of hallucinations.
The technology assists developers in a way that older vector database startups, like Pinecone and Weaviate, do not — targeting app developers instead of infrastructure engineers. In doing so, Chroma also excels in its own way with an open source approach and scalable pricing. As generative AI startups continue to expand, tools like Chroma are expected to continue to develop and help solidify promising advancements in AI technology.
