Pinecone
New York City, US · Founded 2019 · Delaware corporation · 11 known investors
Pinecone provides a vector database and knowledge engine that enables AI applications with semantic search and retrieval capabilities. It serves developers and enterprises building AI applications across industries.
Also known as Pinecone Systems · pinecone.io
Founders & leadership
Pinecone was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty.
Board
Investors · 11
Also in the syndicate · 3
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements$128.2M disclosed across 2 of 4 rounds · 2021–2025
- Undisclosed amountSeries COct 2025Source ↗
▶$100MraisedMay 2023 · 13 investors · Other TechnologyRule 506(b)
- Peter LevineDirector
- Robert WiederholdExecutive Officer, Director
- Lior EhrenfeldExecutive Officer
- Ilan SternDirector
- Edo LibertyExecutive Officer, Director
- Peter WagnerDirector
- Tim TullyDirector
- Offering amount
- $100M
- Amount sold
- $100M
- First sale
- Apr 2023
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2019
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$28.2MraisedApr 2022 · 13 investors · Other TechnologyRule 506(b)
- Edo LibertyExecutive Officer, Director
- Bob WiederholdDirector
- Ilan SternDirector
- Peter WagnerDirector
- Tim TullyDirector
- Lior EhrenfeldExecutive Officer
- Offering amount
- $28.2M
- Amount sold
- $28.2M
- First sale
- Feb 2022
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2019
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
Source: SEC EDGAR Form D. Amounts as filed; amended filings shown once at their latest values.
Valuation · disclosed
Disclosed eventsSource: SEC prospectus filings, and round valuations the company or its investors disclosed — follow each entry's link for the claim.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Pinecone offers a fully managed vector database built for AI workloads, storing, indexing and querying high-dimensional vector embeddings so that models and agents can retrieve relevant proprietary data. The company describes its service as one where writes are acknowledged in under 100ms and searchable within seconds, indexing is automatic with algorithms selected per data size and upgraded in the background, and query latency stays consistent as data volume grows because all data is searched in parallel. Users manage indexes through a web console (app.pinecone.io) or a CLI, with dense indexes deployed across cloud regions such as AWS us-east-1, us-west-2 and eu-west-1.
Beyond the core database, Pinecone ships Pinecone Assistant for question answering over proprietary data and Pinecone Nexus, a knowledge engine for agents that is generally available. Nexus compiles enterprise data into governed knowledge ahead of time and then serves it through a single query, which the company says returns a structured, cited answer without a multi-step retrieve-and-reason loop. Pinecone publishes claims for Nexus of 90% fewer tokens per task, 30x faster than agentic RAG, and 20% higher accuracy than hybrid search, referencing model pass rates on Sierra's τ-Knowledge benchmark leaderboard. A self-hosted Nexus installer for customer-operated Kubernetes clusters is published on the company's GitHub organization.
The platform is positioned for enterprise use with encryption at rest and in transit, SSO, RBAC, customer-managed encryption keys and private networking, plus SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 certifications and uptime and support SLAs. Third-party coverage describes the architecture as serverless, supporting hybrid dense and sparse search and deployable alongside AWS, Azure and GCP.
Founding story
Pinecone was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty. As a research director at AWS and previously at Yahoo!, Liberty had built custom vector search systems at large scale and saw how combining AI models with vector search improved applications such as spam detection and recommendation systems. Assuming a packaged solution already existed for teams without comparable engineering and data-science resources, he found none, and founded Pinecone to provide storage and retrieval infrastructure for AI applications that would be accessible to engineering teams of any size or level of AI expertise — a principle reflected in the fully managed, self-onboarding service.
Business model
Pinecone sells a managed cloud service: developers can create a first index for free and then pay as they go as usage scales, with a pricing estimator on the site for workloads such as RAG pipelines. An enterprise tier adds governance controls, compliance certifications, uptime and support SLAs, and dedicated customer success. A self-hosted deployment path for Pinecone Nexus into a customer-operated Kubernetes cluster is also offered.
Usage-based (consumption) pricing measured in read units, write units, storage and record counts, with a free entry tier and paid plans including enterprise agreements.
Traction
Company page reports more than 10,000 customers and 1M developers worldwide; the GitHub organization README cites 9,000+ companies and 800,000+ developers. At the April 2023 Series B, Pinecone reported explosive Q1 2023 growth in free-plan developers and paying customers, naming Shopify, Gong, HubSpot and Zapier. Public repositories show community traction, e.g. the examples repository at roughly 3,000 stars and the Python SDK at 449 stars. A third-party profile cites over 5,000 paying customers.
Latest developments
Pinecone Nexus, the company's knowledge engine for AI agents, is generally available and is promoted across the site as more accurate, faster and lower cost than agentic RAG and hybrid search, with results referenced to Sierra's τ-Knowledge benchmark; Pinecone also maintains a fork of sierra-research/tau2-bench. A self-hosted Nexus installer for Kubernetes and a Nexus quickstart in the documentation have been published, alongside a marketplace quickstart for no-code knowledge apps in public preview. GitHub repositories including Pulumi providers, the MCP server and the TypeScript, Go and Java clients show updates in August 2026. Leadership now lists Ash Ashutosh as CEO with founder Edo Liberty as Chief Scientist.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Pinecone describes itself as the company that created the vector database category and as knowledge infrastructure for AI at scale. Company materials cite more than 10,000 customers and 1M developers; the GitHub profile cites 9,000+ companies and 800,000+ developers. At its 2023 Series B the company said its technology had disrupted a $9B search infrastructure market and had become a component of a $110B generative AI market. A third-party profile characterizes it as a leading vector database provider and key AI/ML infrastructure vendor with over 5,000 paying customers.
Pinecone positions on a fully managed, no-tuning experience (automatic index selection and background rebalancing), retrieval cost that does not rise with scale, and consistent latency as data grows. Nexus differentiates by pre-compiling enterprise data into governed knowledge served in a single cited query rather than iterative agentic retrieval, with published benchmark claims against hybrid search and agentic RAG. Enterprise governance and compliance certifications (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001), broad SDK/tooling coverage and deep integration with agentic coding tools are further stated differentiators.
Technology
A fully managed vector database with automatic index selection and background rebalancing, sub-100ms write acknowledgment, parallel search across all data for stable p99 latency at scale, dense (and per third-party coverage, hybrid dense/sparse) indexes of varying dimensionality, namespaces, backups, imports, reranking and inference APIs. Pinecone Nexus adds a pre-compiled, governed knowledge layer that answers agent queries in a single call with citations. Open-source clients and tooling are published under the pinecone-io GitHub organization (116 repositories), including Python, TypeScript, Go and Java SDKs, an MCP server, Pulumi providers and a self-hosted Nexus installer.
Go-to-market
Self-service developer onboarding via a free index and extensive documentation, quickstarts, notebooks and sample apps; official SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go and Java; infrastructure-as-code via Terraform and Pulumi providers; integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex and other third-party tools; and distribution through AI coding tools and an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex and Gemini. Enterprise motion is supported by a demo request path, global sales and field engineering leadership, and a marketplace for no-code knowledge apps (public preview).
Developers and engineering teams building AI applications — agents, semantic search, RAG pipelines and recommendation systems — as well as enterprises requiring governed, compliant knowledge infrastructure. Named customers cited in company materials include Shopify, Gong, HubSpot and Zapier.
Geography
Headquarters in New York City (127 W 26th St, 6th Fl, New York, NY 10001) with an office in Tel Aviv (4 Ein Zeitim St., Tel Aviv). At the time of the 2023 Series B the company said it operated in San Francisco, New York and Tel Aviv. Indexes are hosted in multiple cloud regions including AWS us-east-1, us-west-2 and eu-west-1.
History
Founded in 2019, Pinecone introduced its vector database in 2021. Third-party records list a $10M seed round in January 2021 and a $28M Series A in March 2022. In April 2023 the company announced a $100M Series B at a $750M valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, with ICONIQ Growth and existing investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital participating; at that time Edo Liberty was Founder & CEO and Bob Wiederhold was President. Subsequently the company launched Pinecone Assistant and, more recently, Pinecone Nexus, a knowledge engine for agents now generally available. Current leadership lists Ash Ashutosh as CEO and Edo Liberty as Founder & Chief Scientist.
Risks & controversies
Sources report inconsistent figures that complicate diligence: total disclosed funding is given as $138.0M across three rounds by a third-party aggregator versus internal records of ~$128.2M; customer and developer counts differ between the company page (10,000+ customers, 1M developers) and the GitHub README (9,000+ companies, 800,000+ developers); and the same aggregator lists an implausible '10000+' employee count and an unrecognized single leadership entry, suggesting low reliability. Performance and accuracy claims for Nexus are vendor-published. No litigation, regulatory action or public controversy is described in the sources.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Founder mafia
2 people who came through Pinecone went on to found or lead other companies.
Competitors · 6
by search overlap
Companies competing with Pinecone for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline · 5
launches, deals, and filingsThe company leadership page lists Ash Ashutosh as CEO and founder Edo Liberty as Chief Scientist, whereas the 2023 Series B announcement identified Liberty as Founder & CEO and Bob Wiederhold as President.
Pinecone states SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 certification, along with encryption at rest and in transit, SSO, RBAC, CMEK and private networking.
Pinecone Nexus, a knowledge engine that compiles enterprise data into governed knowledge and serves it through a single cited query for AI agents, announced as generally available; accompanied by a Nexus quickstart in the docs and a self-hosted Kubernetes installer on GitHub.
Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from ICONIQ Growth and existing investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital; Peter Levine of a16z quoted. Company reported explosive Q1 2023 growth in paying customers including Shopify, Gong, HubSpot and Zapier.
$100M source ↗
Pinecone introduced its vector database in 2021, which the company describes as creating the vector database category.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
Legal entities · 1
corporate structureIn the news
Pinecone announces $28M Series A for vector databasetechcrunch.com · Mar 2022▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- Pineconepinecone.io · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Pinecone do?
- Pinecone is a fully managed vector database and knowledge engine for building retrieval-based AI applications and agents.
- Who founded Pinecone?
- Pinecone was founded by Edo Liberty in 2019.
- Who are Pinecone's investors?
- Pinecone's investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Converge, ICONIQ, Menlo Ventures, Wing, Wonder Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Tiger Global Management.
- How much funding has Pinecone raised?
- Pinecone has disclosed $128.2M raised across 2 of its 4 known rounds.
- Where is Pinecone headquartered?
- Pinecone is headquartered in New York City, US.