AI startup Pinecone has raised a whopping $100 million in their Series B funding, at a $750 million valuation. The finance round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Pinecone, which provides long-term memory for large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s GPT-4, is based in New York city.
The company is comprised of a managed service, which allows engineers to build applications that use AI model embeddings quickly and cost-effectively. With this, chatbots can use their own data to give accurate responses – as opposed to other AI generators who create “hallucinations”.
The explosion of popularity with ChatGPT last fall has sent Pinecone skyrocketing, and they saw a significant surge in the number of paying customers across all industries in the early months of 2023, including Gong and Zapier.
Founder and CEO of Pinecone, Edo Liberty, had a Zoom interview with VentureBeat, describing how the pace of the generative AI shift came as a surprise. He said: “It kind of breached the collective psyche. It grew gradually but then it just took off overnight. When ChatGPT launched, millions of developers all over the world got excited and got super-creative about the kinds of stuff that you can do with this.”
Greg Kogan, Vice President of Marketing at Pinecone, spoke with VentureBeat about a newly released research paper indicating a new architecture, the Recurrent Memory Transformer (RMT) allows LLMS to retain information up to 2 million tokens. Despite this, he maintained that there is a gap between what works in the lab and what is thus usable for real-world applications, and “That’s the gap we want to bridge.”
About Pinecone
Pinecone is a leading vector database company founded in 2021 which offers engineers managed services to build and scale AI models quickly and with optimum cost-efficiency. The company is headquartered in New York City and is focussing on providing optimum memory solutions for AI applications in the generative AI era.
About Edo Liberty
Edo Liberty is the Founder and CEO of Pinecone, who previously served as Director of Research and Head of Amazon AI Labs. He speaks widely on language and AI, believing it to be something that everyone needs to be aware of and adapt to in whatever way they can. His passion and dedication towards AI is commendable and has led to the success of Pinecone.
