Zilliz, a San Francisco-based startup that builds cloud-native software to process data for artificial intelligence (AI) applications and unstructured data analytics, has raised $60 million in an extended Series B funding round to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams.
The Series B+ round, as an extension to the first tranche of $43 million, was led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the $1-billion diversified growth fund under Aramco Ventures. Existing investors Temasek Holdings’ Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital Group, 5Y Capital and Yunqi Capital participated in the deal, Zilliz announced in a statement on Wednesday.
The new funding brought the total investment in Zilliz to $113 million. It will use this influx of capital to double down on its commitment to open source and managed cloud offerings, according to the statement.
Zilliz was built in 2017 by the engineers who had created Milvus, the popular open source vector database for similarity searches. The startup was set out in Shanghai with a mission to deliver data insights with AI before it relocated the headquarters to Silicon Valley.
It builds next-generation database technologies to help organisations rapidly create AI/ML (machine learning) applications and unlock the potential of unstructured data. Its technologies and products help over 1,000 organisations create AI applications in various scenarios, including computer vision, image retrieval, video analysis, natural language processing (NLP), recommendation engines, targeted ads, smart chatbots, fraud detection, new drug discovery and beyond.
“With its leadership on Milvus, Zilliz is a global leader in vector similarity search on massive amounts of unstructured data,” said Aysar Tayeb, executive managing director of Prosperity7 Ventures.
“We believe that the company is in a strong position to build a cloud platform around Milvus that will unleash new and powerful business insights and outcomes for its customers, just as data analytics platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have done with structured data. There is already over 4x more unstructured data than structured data, a gap that will continue to grow as AI, robotics, IoT (Internet of Things) and other technologies meld the digital and physical realms,” said Tayeb.