SeMI Technologies, a startup emerging from ING Labs, has successfully secured $16 million in funding for its open-source Weaviate vector-search database.
The Series A funding round was co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Cortical Ventures, positioning SeMI at the helm of the evolving AI-driven database landscape.
Unlike traditional databases that merely store raw data, Weaviate enhances this process by employing machine learning models to facilitate superior indexing and searching capabilities. By making Weaviate open source, SeMI aims to democratize access to search technologies that have typically been monopolized by major tech corporations. Users have the flexibility to deploy the database on their own infrastructure or take advantage of a managed SaaS solution with one-click setup.
Bob Van Luijt, CEO of SeMI, notes, “Weaviate empowers enterprises with databases fundamentally designed around machine learning and deep learning. While our initial applications have focused on natural language processing, we are also investigating possibilities across images, videos, audio, and even more specialized domains like graph or gene embeddings.”