SeMI Technologies, an Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based provider of open-source Weaviate vector-search database, raised $16M in Series A funding.
The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Cortical Ventures. This investment follows a previously unannounced $1.6m seed financing led by Zetta Venture Partners with ING Ventures also participating, in August 2020.
The company intends to use the funds to focus on making Weaviate the de facto standard in open-source vector search.
Originally spun out of ING Labs by CEO Bob Van Luijt, CTO Etienne Dilocker, and COO Micha Verhagen, SeMI Technologies builds core software infrastructure for AI-first applications. Weaviate is an open source vector search engine that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for combining vector search with structured filtering with the fault-tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database, all accessible through GraphQL, REST, and various language clients. It has already been downloaded over 700k times.
SeMI gives customers the option of running it on their infrastructure (allowing them to maintain control of their data, safely behind their own firewalls) or as a managed SaaS offering with one-click access.
The company offers products and services around its Weaviate open-source solution. These include managed services, a service license agreement, and support. Hundreds of users have applied Weaviate in more than 100 different use cases in technology, finance, media, cybersecurity, health care, and many other industries.
FinSMEs
22/02/2022