ING Labs spin-out startup SeMI Technologies has raised $16 million for its open-source Weaviate vector-search database.
New Enterprise Associates and Cortical Ventures co-led the Series A round for SeMI, which is at the forefront of a new era of AI-first database technologies.
While normal databases just store raw data, Weaviate stores data that is processed by machine learning models, allowing users to better index and search through their data.
SeMI has made Weaviate open source, promising to democratise search capabilities that have been closely guarded by a handful of Big Tech giants. Customers can run the database on their infrastructure or as a managed SaaS offering with one-click access.
Bob Van Luijt CEO, SeMI, says: "Weaviate gives any enterprise the advantage of databases built with ML and deep learning at their core. The first use cases have been natural-language ones but we are also exploring images, videos, audio, and even esoteric cases such as graph or gene embeddings."