5Y News | 5Y Capital Portfolio Company Zilliz Closes $60 Million Series B+ Round
Further empowering enterprise AI applications.
Vector database company Zilliz announced it has raised $60 million in new funding, expanding its Series B to $103 million. The round was led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund under Saudi Aramco's Aramco Ventures, with continued participation from existing investors Pavilion Capital (Temasek), Hillhouse, 5Y Capital, and Yunqi Capital. Multi-Dimension Capital served as exclusive financial advisor. To date, Zilliz has raised a total of $113 million. The new capital will go toward expanding R&D and market teams, accelerating development and commercialization of its fully managed cloud service Zilliz Cloud, and advancing its global market presence.
Zilliz is a pioneer in vector database technology, dedicated to developing vector database systems for AI production environments. Modern AI algorithms use feature vectors to represent the deep semantics of unstructured data, generating massive volumes of vector data. Efficiently processing this data to enable broader AI deployment requires more specialized, purpose-built data infrastructure. In response to this challenge, Zilliz invented industry-leading cloud-native vector database technology capable of processing billion-scale vector data at millisecond latency.
"Milvus originated as an internal R&D project at Zilliz. We open-sourced it in 2019, and in 2020 the project entered incubation under the LF AI & Data Foundation of the Linux Foundation, graduating to top-tier project status in 2021," said Charles Xie, Zilliz's founder and CEO. "Along the way, Milvus has accumulated thousands of enterprise users and grown into the world's most popular open-source vector database. In the next phase, Zilliz will continue as the project's primary contributor and maintainer, adding to the Milvus open-source community, while accelerating R&D on a fully managed vector database service built on public cloud — providing enterprise users with a more secure, reliable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective cloud database solution."
A beta version of Zilliz Cloud has launched for invited users to experience early. The Zilliz team will refine and polish the vector database cloud service based on beta feedback, with the goal of opening it to all users soon. Zilliz Cloud is positioned as a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) built on public cloud, designed to provide a one-stop solution for vector data processing, unstructured data analytics, and enterprise AI application development.
Over the past year, Zilliz has achieved numerous milestone accomplishments in community building, product development, and cutting-edge research:
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Deepened engagement with the Milvus open-source community, driving rapid user growth. Milvus downloads surpassed 1 million, tripling from the previous year; production users tripled; GitHub stars doubled to over 11,000; and contributor numbers doubled;
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Actively built out the vector database ecosystem by developing and open-sourcing Towhee, an unstructured data ETL platform that helps developers easily use AI models to extract feature vectors from various unstructured data types, significantly shortening development time for vector database applications;
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Won the global BigANN vector retrieval challenge, pushing the boundaries of vector search algorithms. The BigANN Challenge, held at NeurIPS 2021, was the first global competition dedicated to exploring innovative methods for billion-scale vector search;
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Led research and innovation in the database field, with research results published at top database conferences SIGMOD'21 and VLDB'22.
Zilliz remains committed to database technology innovation in the cloud-native era, and will continue developing vector database service cloud platforms for enterprise AI applications.
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