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When Ed Liberty was getting his PhD in Computer Science, Yale In a random projection, he would hardly have imagined that a decade later it would become a fundamental building block of modern AI.
Liberty is a pioneer in vector databases Pine conehas raised over $138 million, including a $100 million round in 2023. After all, random projection, the subject of his thesis, remains the foundation of modern vector search, even as new innovations and use cases for vector databases proliferate. In 2024, vector database technology is no longer a niche or outlier, but a necessary component to enable search augmentation generative (RAG) use cases with generative AI.
Vector database technology was not widespread when Pinecone was founded in 2019. However, that has now changed, as nearly every major database vendor offers Vector database capabilities, including Oracle, MongoDB, DataStax, and even Google Cloud.
Pinecone is currently differentiating itself from other Vector database technologies in a number of ways. The company today announced the general availability of its Pinecone serverless database offering across all three major cloud vendors, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In addition to general availability, Pinecone is integrating a set of new capabilities that extend the capabilities and utility of its Vector database platform technology.
“We started with a handful of people building a product that no one had ever heard of and have grown into perhaps the most popular database space in the world,” Liberty told VentureBeat.
How the Pinecone serverless vector database works
Pinecone first previewed a serverless version of its Vector Database in January, and the service was first made generally available on AWS, and with today’s announcement, is now also available on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The fundamental promise of serverless is that organizations get an optimized, managed approach where costs are determined based on usage, and Liberty highlighted the benefit of ease of use by removing the complexity of managing infrastructure services.
“First of all, customers don’t have any involvement with the concept of compute, they don’t choose the node size or the CPU,” Liberty says. “In terms of capacity, they only have to involve reads and writes, and storage.”
Another key benefit of the serverless approach is scalability: Liberty says that users shouldn’t care whether they spin up an application with 5,000 vectors or 5 billion vectors.
“You just create an index and start using the service,” he said.
New features expand Pinecone’s serverless vector database
The Pinecone serverless vector database is now generally available across three cloud vendors, along with a set of new features.
One of the new features is bulk import of data into Pinecone.
“This means that if you have a lot of data in one cloud, you can move it to another cloud or store it somewhere else and create a huge index very easily and cheaply,” Liberty said.
Pinecone is also now adding role-based access control (RBAC) to its serverless vector database product. While RBAC is a feature that is typically related to security, it’s not a primary benefit for Pinecone users. Liberty says the new RBAC feature will be a big help to overall data governance by providing access control capabilities.
“When you build your infrastructure, you need to be able to control who has permission to do what – whether that be the ability to read, write or delete – and role-based access control gives you that authority,” Liberty said.
Alongside the database update, Pinecone is also announcing a new software development kit (SDK). The new SDK aims to make it easier for developers to integrate Pinecone into their application workflows, especially dot net applications.
Why Pinecone isn’t worried about vector database competition
As Vector database support becomes more prevalent across multiple vendors, Liberty believes his company has a strong point of differentiation.
In his view, any database vendor that takes a multi-model approach that treats vectors as just another data type won’t be able to beat Pinecone. Liberty emphasized that vectors have always been a focus for Pinecone and give it a strong competitive advantage.
“From day one, we’ve provided a great developer experience, and once you start developing and building, we’re the most scalable, efficient, performant and cost-effective software for vector search,” Liberty said. “We’re very focused on production and enterprise readiness.”
