Qdrant
Category: AI Infrastructure
An open-source, high-performance vector database and search engine built in Rust, purpose-built for production AI workloads including RAG, semantic search, and AI agents. Qdrant was founded in 2021. The company is led by André Zayarni. Based in Berlin, Germany. Team size: 51-100. Total funding raised: $87.5M. Latest round: Series B. Key investors include AVP, Spark Capital, Unusual Ventures, 42CAP, Bosch Ventures, IBB Ventures.
- Founded
- 2021
- Headquarters
- Berlin, Germany
- Team size
- 51-100
- Total funding
- $87.5M
Value proposition
High-performance vector search engine with a composable architecture giving engineers explicit control over indexing, filtering, scoring, and ranking — built in Rust for speed and memory safety, with native hybrid search (dense + sparse), multi-vector support, and advanced metadata filtering.
Products and solutions
Qdrant Vector Database (open-source), Qdrant Cloud (managed SaaS on AWS/GCP/Azure), Qdrant Hybrid Cloud (BYO Kubernetes), Qdrant Enterprise Solutions (on-prem/private cloud), Qdrant Cloud Inference (native embedding generation), Qdrant Edge (lightweight edge deployment)
Unique value
The only vector database offering a fully composable retrieval architecture with one-stage filtered HNSW search (no pre/post filtering), native hybrid dense-sparse search, and full-spectrum reranking — all in a Rust-built engine deployable from edge to cloud to on-prem.
Target customer
AI engineering teams and enterprises building production-grade retrieval systems for RAG, recommendation engines, semantic search, and AI agents across e-commerce, legal tech, hospitality, HR tech, and healthcare.
Industries served
E-commerce, Legal Tech, Hospitality & Travel, HR Tech, Healthcare Tech
Technology advantage
Rust-native architecture with SIMD; custom HNSW with one-stage filtered traversal; Gridstore custom storage engine; advanced quantization (asymmetric, scalar, binary); native multi-vector support; full reranking spectrum including ColBERT late interaction and MMR; built-in embedding inference in cloud tier.
How they differentiate
Composable architecture (modular indexing/filtering/scoring/ranking primitives); built entirely in Rust with SIMD optimizations and custom Gridstore engine; native hybrid search (dense + sparse vectors with BM25, SPLADE++, miniCOIL); one-stage filtered HNSW (no pre/post filtering); asymmetric/scalar/binary quantization reducing memory up to 64x; real-time indexing without rebuilds; SOC2 Type II and HIPAA certified; deployable across cloud/hybrid/on-prem/edge.
Main competitors
Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus (Zilliz)
Key partnerships
Cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Red Hat OpenShift, DigitalOcean, Vultr, OVHcloud, Scaleway, Civo, STACKIT. Embeddings: OpenAI, Cohere
Notable customers
Tripadvisor, HubSpot, OpenTable, Bazaarvoice, Bosch, Canva
Major milestones
January 2022: €2M Pre-Seed led by 42CAP and IBB Ventures, April 2023: $7.5M Seed led by Unusual Ventures, January 2024: $28M Series A led by Spark Capital, 2024: Achieved SOC2 Type II and HIPAA certifications, 2024: Exceeded 5M downloads (at Series A), then 250M+ downloads, 2025: Launched Qdrant Hybrid Cloud and Qdrant Cloud Inference, July 2025: Launched Qdrant Edge (private beta), March 2026: $50M Series B led by AVP with Bosch Ventures, 33K+ GitHub stars, 100+ employees across 20+ countries.
Growth metrics
250M+ downloads; 33.2K GitHub stars; 60K+ community members; 100+ employees; 9K+ community members
Market positioning
Open-source leader in vector databases for production AI, positioned as a "picks-and-shovels" infrastructure provider. Competes against Pinecone (managed-first), Weaviate (hybrid GraphQL), Milvus (distributed-scale), and Chroma (lightweight). Leads in single-node latency benchmarks at 1M-10M vector scale with strong Rust-based performance differentiation.
Geographic focus
Global (headquarters in Berlin, Germany; team across 20+ countries)
About André Zayarni
Ex-PLAYTOMIC; Ex-MoBerries GmbH. M.Sc. in Computer Science from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (2007). Worked in technology industry since 2009.
Official website: https://qdrant.tech