Pinecone at a glance
Pinecone is a private, New York-based company that sells a fully managed vector database for AI. Edo Liberty founded it in 2019. Ash Ashutosh has been CEO since September 8, 2025, and Liberty is now Chief Scientist. The company has raised $138 million from Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Growth, Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital. Its last disclosed valuation was $750 million, set by its April 2023 Series B. Pinecone says more than 10,000 customers and 1 million developers use its platform.
What a vector database does
AI models turn text, images and other data into embeddings, which are long lists of numbers where similar meanings sit close together. A vector database stores those embeddings and finds the nearest matches to a query in milliseconds. That is the core step in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where an LLM gets relevant private documents before it answers. It also powers semantic search, recommendations and memory for AI agents.
How Pinecone makes money
Pinecone charges by usage. On its serverless database, customers pay for storage plus read units and write units. Hosted embedding and reranking models, Pinecone Assistant and the Nexus knowledge engine are billed separately. A free Starter tier draws in developers. Standard and Enterprise plans carry monthly minimums, and many large customers buy through AWS, Google Cloud or Azure marketplaces. Pinecone does not disclose revenue.
Technology: serverless retrieval
Pinecone Serverless launched in January 2024 and replaced always-on pods as the main product. Data lives on object storage and is cached on demand. Storage is separated from compute, and reads from writes, so indexes scale to billions of vectors without capacity planning. The engine is written in Rust and supports dense, sparse and hybrid search, metadata filtering and up to 1,000,000 namespaces per index on Enterprise plans.
Funding and ownership
- January 2021: $10 million seed led by Wing Venture Capital, alongside the public beta.
- March 2022: $28 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures.
- April 2023: $100 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz with ICONIQ Growth, at a $750 million valuation.
Pinecone remains privately held by its founders, employees and these investors. In August 2025 The Information reported that the company had held early talks with bankers about options including a sale, naming Oracle, IBM, MongoDB and Snowflake as possible buyers. No deal has been announced.
Leadership change in 2025
On September 8, 2025, Pinecone named Ash Ashutosh CEO. Ashutosh founded Serano Systems, AppIQ and Actifio, all later acquired, and most recently worked in solution sales at Google. Liberty became Chief Scientist to lead research. Ashutosh told TechTarget his goal is to make AI 'knowledgeable' by moving Pinecone up the stack toward enterprise production workloads.
2026: Nexus and global expansion
In May 2026 Pinecone opened serverless regions in AWS Frankfurt and Singapore, its first in Asia. Nexus, a knowledge engine that turns company data and workflows into governed, agent-ready knowledge, entered public preview on July 1, 2026 and reached general availability on August 6, 2026.
Competitors
Pinecone's specialist rivals include Zilliz (Milvus), Qdrant, Weaviate, Chroma and Turbopuffer. Broader rivals add vector search to platforms customers already run: PostgreSQL with pgvector (including Supabase), MongoDB Atlas, Elastic, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks and AWS. Notion, once a showcase customer, reportedly moved off Pinecone in 2025, which shows the price pressure on the category.
Outlook
Pinecone's next phase depends on whether agent workloads, which it expects to far exceed human query volume, turn Nexus and its serverless database into larger enterprise contracts. The other open question is whether it stays independent, raises again or becomes part of a larger data platform.
