companies
Zilliz
Creator and maintainer of the open-source Milvus vector database, offering a fully managed cloud service for billion-scale AI search.
Zilliz was founded in 2017 by Charles Xie, a former founding engineer on Oracle's 12c cloud database project, to build infrastructure for storing and searching the vector embeddings that power modern AI applications. The company created Milvus, now one of the most widely deployed open-source vector databases, and remains its primary maintainer under the LF AI & Data Foundation. Its commercial product, Zilliz Cloud, is a fully managed version of Milvus that handles sharding, indexing, and scaling automatically, aimed at teams that don't want to run etcd, Pulsar, and MinIO themselves just to serve vector search. The company markets Zilliz Cloud as materially faster than self-hosted Milvus at scale, particularly for workloads spanning hundreds of millions to billions of vectors. Originally based in China, Zilliz relocated its headquarters to San Francisco and has raised roughly $113 million across multiple rounds, including a Series B extension backed by Prosperity7 Ventures, Hillhouse Capital, and Temasek's Pavilion Capital.
- Founded
- 2017
- Headquarters
- Redwood City, United States
- Sector
- infrastructure
Tools
- Zilliz Cloud
Managed Milvus cloud service for building vector search, retrieval, and AI applications.
- Milvus
Open-source vector database for similarity search, hybrid retrieval, metadata filtering, and AI application data.