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.
Jeremy Suh is a San Francisco-based software engineer and co-founder who built Browser Buddy - an AI-powered recommendation engine for high-quality internet writing - through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. Exa, the AI search infrastructure company redefining how developers access web data for LLMs, acquired Browser Buddy in its first-ever acquisition, bringing Jeremy and co-founder Arnav Wadehra onto the team. At Exa, he works on new approaches to retrieval and web organization at a company now valued at $2.2 billion following a $250 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2026.
Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine for AIs. Their neural search API lets developers and AI agents retrieve high-quality, factual content from the web using natural-language queries, powering RAG, research agents, and enterprise knowledge workflows.
Will Bryk is the co-founder and CEO of Exa, a neural search engine built for the AI era. A Harvard CS and physics graduate who interned at SpaceX and engineered AI products at Cresta, Bryk left to answer a question that gnawed at him: what if Google was already obsolete? Exa reimagines search using transformer-based link prediction - what Bryk calls 'neural PageRank on steroids' - to help AI agents find exactly the right information rather than keyword-stuffed SEO noise. The company raised $85M in a Benchmark-led Series B at a $700M valuation in September 2025, with Nvidia and Lightspeed also backing the bet that AI systems will soon generate more search queries than humans.
Vicki Boykis is a founding ML engineer and one of the most respected voices in applied machine learning. Known for making complex systems legible through rigorous writing and dry wit, she runs the Normcore Tech newsletter, authored a widely-cited deep dive on embeddings, built Viberary (a semantic book recommendation engine), and created Normconf - an unconventional data conference celebrating the unglamorous realities of ML work. She brings an economist's skepticism and a software engineer's discipline to a field that often confuses hype for progress.
ZeroEntropy is the AI infrastructure company fixing the broken retrieval layer of modern AI applications. Founded in 2024 by Ghita Houir Alami (CEO) and Nicholas Pipitone (CTO), the San Francisco–based startup builds rerankers, embedding models, and end-to-end search infrastructure that outperforms Google, OpenAI, Cohere, and Voyage on public benchmarks. Backed by Y Combinator (W25) and a $4.2M seed round led by Initialized Capital, ZeroEntropy's products — zerank-2, zembed-1, zsearch, and ze-onprem — are used by enterprises including Assembled (serving Stripe, Canva, Robinhood, and Notion). The company's proprietary zELO training methodology, derived from chess Elo ratings and the Thurstone statistical model, produces models with calibrated relevance judgments that binary labels cannot replicate.