What is Pinecone?
Pinecone helps teams build and scale vector database and ai knowledge infrastructure products.
- Category
- Vector database and AI knowledge infrastructure
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, CA
- Founded
- 2019
- Employees
- 200-300 estimated
- Total funding
- $138M disclosed equity
- Valuation
- $750M last disclosed valuation
What is Pinecone?
Pinecone is a vector database and ai knowledge infrastructure company founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
Pinecone builds vector database and ai knowledge infrastructure infrastructure for teams that need production software, AI, or data workflows rather than one-off prototypes. Revenue is not disclosed; Pinecone reports more than 10,000 customers and 1M developers. Its public scale signal is 10,000+ customers and 1M developers.
The company sits in a fast-moving market where buyers care about reliability, security, integration depth, and procurement maturity. Created the managed vector database category. Its position is strongest when customers need a managed platform that shortens engineering time while still fitting into existing cloud, data, and developer workflows.
For sellers, Pinecone is best treated as a scaled technical buyer. Engineering and product leaders influence architecture, finance and operations shape budget, and security or procurement becomes more important as contract size grows.
What does Pinecone offer?
Pinecone's product set centers on Pinecone Database, Pinecone Nexus, Pinecone Assistant.
- Pinecone Database· Core product
- Pinecone Nexus· Core product
- Pinecone Assistant· Core product
- Integrated embedding and reranking· Expansion product
- Bring-your-own-cloud deployments· Expansion product
- Dedicated read nodes· Expansion product
How does Pinecone make money?
Pinecone makes money through usage, subscription, committed-capacity, and enterprise contracts depending on customer scale.
Starter is free, Builder is $20/month, Standard has a $50/month usage minimum, and Enterprise has a $500/month usage minimum plus committed-use contracts. Storage is listed at $0.33/GB-month on paid database plans, write units at roughly $4-$6.75 per million depending on plan and cloud, and read units at roughly $16-$27 per million.
Growth is driven by land-and-expand adoption: individual developers or small teams start with self-serve usage, then production workloads create larger commitments, security requirements, support needs, and procurement events. Enterprise customers typically pay for higher limits, private deployment patterns, governance, support, SLAs, and negotiated usage economics.
The unit economics depend on the underlying product category. Software-heavy products expand through seats and usage, while AI infrastructure and GPU-cloud businesses require disciplined capacity planning, reserved commitments, power and data-center execution, and high utilization of expensive compute assets.
Who leads Pinecone?
Pinecone is led by Edo Liberty, with technical, product, and go-to-market ownership spread across the leadership team.
- Edo LibertyFounder & CEOFounded Pinecone in 2019Former AWS and Yahoo researcher; sets product and company strategy.
- Bob WiederholdPresidentExecutive leadershipFormer Couchbase CEO; supports enterprise scaling and go-to-market.
- Ram SriharshaEngineering leaderExecutive leadershipWorks on the distributed systems that keep Pinecone production-grade.
- James BriggsDeveloper relations leaderGo-to-market leadershipTurns vector search and RAG concepts into developer education.
How do you contact Pinecone's leadership?
Use published company channels first. The personal addresses below are format-following examples using pinecone.io; they should be verified before outreach and are not presented as confirmed personal inboxes.
first@pinecone.io (format-following example, not a verified personal mailbox)How much funding has Pinecone raised?
Pinecone has $138M disclosed equity; its latest disclosed valuation/status is $750M last disclosed valuation.
Pinecone's disclosed financing history is concentrated in these major events: 2019-2020 Seed and early rounds; Mar 2022 Series A - $28M; Apr 2023 Series B - $100M at $750M valuation. The latest disclosed valuation or market status is $750M last disclosed valuation.
2019-2020: Seed and early rounds. Early capital from Wing Venture Capital and other backers funded the first managed vector database work. Mar 2022: Series A - $28M. Led by Menlo Ventures, with Wing and others participating as generative-AI infrastructure demand accelerated. Apr 2023: Series B - $100M at $750M valuation. Led by Andreessen Horowitz, with ICONIQ Growth, Menlo Ventures, and Wing participating.
The funding signal matters because it defines buying capacity and operating pressure. Late-stage capital usually means new hiring, platform expansion, security upgrades, finance-process maturity, and larger procurement reviews; earlier-stage profiles require tighter ROI and founder-led evaluation.
How did Pinecone get here?
Pinecone's path runs from founding in 2019 through product expansion and its latest financing or public-market milestone.
- 2019Company foundedEdo Liberty starts Pinecone to commercialize vector search infrastructure.
- 2021Vector database launchedPinecone introduces a managed vector database for semantic search and recommendation workloads.
- Mar 2022Series A raisedThe company raises $28M to expand engineering and go-to-market.
- Apr 2023Series B raisedPinecone raises $100M and discloses a $750M valuation.
- 2024Serverless database pushPinecone shifts more workloads toward serverless, usage-based infrastructure.
- 2025-2026Nexus and AI knowledge productsThe company broadens from vector storage into knowledge infrastructure for agents and RAG.
Who are Pinecone's competitors?
Pinecone competes with category specialists, open-source alternatives, and larger platform vendors.
- WeaviateOpen-source vector database with hybrid search and self-managed options.
- ChromaDeveloper-first open-source embedding database popular in local RAG prototypes.
- QdrantRust-based open-source vector database with managed cloud and on-prem deployments.
- Milvus / ZillizOpen-source Milvus plus managed Zilliz Cloud for large-scale vector search.
- ElasticSearch incumbent adding vector and hybrid retrieval inside Elasticsearch.
Pinecone — frequently asked questions
