Skip to main content

Zilliz

Category: AI Infrastructure

Zilliz Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native vector database platform designed to power enterprise-grade AI applications through efficient storage, indexing, and retrieval of unstructured data. Zilliz was founded in 2017. The company is led by Charles Xie. Based in Redwood City, California, USA. Team size: 200+. Total funding raised: $113M. Latest round: Series B+. Key investors include ["Prosperity7 Ventures","Hillhouse Capital Management","Pavilion Capital","Yunqi Partners","Aramco Ventures","5Y Capital"].

Founded
2017
Headquarters
Redwood City, California, USA
Team size
200+
Total funding
$113M

Value proposition

Enables enterprises to build and deploy production-ready AI solutions by providing a high-performance, scalable, and reliable vector database for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), semantic search, and recommendation engines.

Products and solutions

["Zilliz Cloud","Milvus (Open-source vector database)"]

Unique value

Pioneered the open-source vector database space with Milvus, one of the world's most popular projects for managing vector embeddings. Zilliz Cloud builds on this foundation to offer a secure, enterprise-grade managed solution.

Target customer

Enterprises building generative AI applications, search engines, and recommendation systems that require scalable vector search on unstructured data (text, images, audio).

Industries served

["Technology/Software","Financial Services","E-commerce","Healthcare & Life Sciences","Media & Entertainment","Manufacturing & Logistics"]

Technology advantage

Offers ultra-fast similarity search across billions of vectors, seamless integration with major cloud providers and AI frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex), and enterprise features like high availability, scalability, and security.

How they differentiate

Zilliz leverages its leadership in the open-source Milvus project combined with a robust, enterprise-grade managed cloud offering, providing flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in. Its deep integrations with major cloud providers are also a key differentiator.

Main competitors

["Pinecone","Weaviate","Qdrant","LanceDB"]

Key partnerships

["Amazon Web Services (AWS)","Google Cloud (GCP)","Microsoft Azure","LangChain","LlamaIndex"]

Notable customers

["eBay","Tencent Music Entertainment","Shopee","AT&T","Nvidia","PayPal","Walmart","Salesforce","IBM"]

Major milestones

["Creator of the popular open-source vector database Milvus","Launched Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed service on major cloud platforms","Named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Management","Raised $60M in a Series B+ funding round and relocated headquarters to San Francisco in August 2022"]

Growth metrics

The open-source Milvus project has over 1,000 contributors on GitHub, millions of downloads worldwide, and Zilliz serves over 1,000 paying enterprise customers.

Market positioning

A leader in the vector database market, strong in both open-source community adoption (via Milvus) and enterprise-focused managed services.

Geographic focus

Global, with a strong presence in North America and Asia, and a growing customer base in Europe.

Patents and IP

Holds multiple patents related to high-performance similarity search and indexing algorithms.

About Charles Xie

Charles Xie is the founder and CEO of Zilliz, a company focused on developing high-performance vector database management systems for AI applications. He is the creator of Milvus, an open-source vector database. Before founding Zilliz, he worked at Oracle as a founding engineer of the Oracle 12c cloud database project, spending over six years there.

Official website: