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.
Brian Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured, the leading enterprise ETL platform for making raw, unstructured data LLM-ready. A former CIA intelligence officer and White House National Security Council director, Raymond pivoted from government service through investment banking and AI startup Primer before founding Unstructured in 2022. In just two years, he raised $65 million across three rounds from Menlo Ventures, Databricks, IBM, NVIDIA, and others, building the critical 'first mile of AI' infrastructure that powers enterprise RAG pipelines and GenAI applications globally.
PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, an open-source, MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for hybrid transactional and analytical workloads. TiDB scales horizontally across cloud and on-prem deployments, and now powers AI agent workloads through TiDB X with built-in vector search.
Unstructured is a San Francisco company building the data layer for generative AI. Its open-source library and enterprise platform ingest PDFs, slide decks, emails, images and 70+ other file types, then transform them into clean, structured data that LLMs and RAG pipelines can actually use.
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.
Tiger Data - formerly Timescale - is the New York-based company behind TimescaleDB, an open-source PostgreSQL extension that began as a time-series workhorse and has grown into a full operational database platform for transactional, analytical, and agentic workloads. In June 2025 the company rebranded around its long-time tiger mascot and now ships Tiger Cloud, Tiger Postgres, and Agentic Postgres - a Postgres flavor purpose-built for AI agents with zero-copy forks, hybrid storage, BM25 and vector search, and an MCP server.
Daniel Svonava is the Co-Founder and CEO of Superlinked, an ML infrastructure company building self-hosted inference infrastructure for vector search and document processing. A Slovak-born engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, he spent six years as an ML Tech Lead at YouTube building ad performance systems powering over $10B in annual ad revenue before co-founding Superlinked in 2021. Superlinked raised a $9.5M seed round led by Index Ventures in March 2024, and the company is on a mission to make vector-based retrieval accessible and production-ready for enterprises.
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.
Glean is an AI-powered Work AI platform founded in 2019 by former Google and Rubrik engineers, headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. The company offers enterprise search, an AI assistant, and an agentic platform that connects to 100+ business applications, enabling employees to find information and automate work across their entire digital workspace. With a mission to expand human potential to do extraordinary work, Glean has grown to over $200M ARR, achieved a $7.2B valuation in June 2025, and counts 400+ enterprises including Booking.com, eBay, LinkedIn, and Samsung as customers.