Vectara is a Palo Alto-based enterprise AI company building a trusted, end-to-end platform for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents. Founded in 2022 by former Google AI researchers, it lets companies embed grounded, citation-backed GenAI - conversational assistants, semantic search, and agents - into their products while actively detecting and correcting hallucinations at runtime. Its stack includes the Boomerang embedding model, the RAG-tuned Mockingbird LLM, the open-source Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM), and a Guardian Agent layer, positioning Vectara as a leader in factual, secure, compliance-ready enterprise AI.
Matt Riley co-founded Swiftype (YC W12) in 2012, built it into a leading search-as-a-service platform, and sold it to Elastic in 2017. He then spent nearly eight years at Elastic as GVP & GM of Search, overseeing product, engineering, design, and developer relations for one of the world's most widely used search platforms. In late 2025, he returned to Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner - advising the next generation of founders using hard-won lessons from the full founder arc: zero to startup, startup to acquisition, acquisition to enterprise scale.