# LanceDB

> LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.

- **Founded:** 2021
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, United States
- **Founders:** Chang She (Co-founder & CEO), Lei Xu (Co-founder & CTO)
- **Team size:** ~44 employees
- **Products:** Lance Format, LanceDB, Multimodal Lakehouse
- **Notable:** Open-source packages downloaded more than 20 million times (as of June 2025), Lance cited as the fastest-growing format across the data ecosystem, WeRide reported ~90x ML developer productivity gains, cutting data mining from a week to an hour

## Products & services

- **Lance Format** — Open-source columnar storage format built on Apache Arrow, optimized for multimodal AI. Convert from Parquet in two lines for up to 100x faster random access, with built-in vector indexing and data versioning.
- **LanceDB** — Developer-friendly, embedded/serverless vector database for production-scale AI retrieval, supporting vector, full-text and hybrid search with SQL filtering.
- **Multimodal Lakehouse** — Unified enterprise platform combining a data lake and vector database for AI workloads - feature engineering with Python UDFs, data curation, deduplication and direct model training from curated data (up to ~70% MFU).

## Achievements

- Open-source packages downloaded more than 20 million times (as of June 2025)
- Lance cited as the fastest-growing format across the data ecosystem
- WeRide reported ~90x ML developer productivity gains, cutting data mining from a week to an hour
- Lance repo at thousands of GitHub stars with Rust-first, multi-language bindings
- Raised ~$41M total across Seed and Series A with Databricks Ventures participation

## Latest updates

- **2025-06** — Closed $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures to build the Multimodal Lakehouse; total funding reaches ~$41M.
- **2024-05** — Raised $8M (total $11M) led by CRV; revealed Midjourney and Character.AI as customers.

## Links

- Website: https://lancedb.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lancedb
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lancedb
- GitHub: https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/lancedb
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-08