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Pinecone

Vector DatabaseFounded 2019
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: October 2026

Founders

Who Founded Pinecone?

Edo Liberty · Founded 2019 · HQ today: New York, New York, United States

Who founded Pinecone?

Pinecone was founded by Edo Liberty in 2019. It is now led by Ash Ashutosh.

Founders
Edo Liberty
Founded
2019
Headquarters
New York, New York, United States
Number of founders
1
Current CEO
Ash Ashutosh (since 2025)
Where was Pinecone founded?
Pinecone was founded in San Francisco, California, United States in 2019.
When was Pinecone founded?
Pinecone was founded in 2019.
Who started Pinecone?
Pinecone was founded by Edo Liberty.
How old is Pinecone?
Pinecone is 7 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

Edo Liberty spent years in research at Yahoo and then led Amazon AI Labs at AWS. He saw that AI models represent data as vectors but there was no database built to search those vectors at scale. He founded Pinecone in 2019, launched a public beta with a $10 million seed round in January 2021, and the product took off after ChatGPT's release in late 2022 made RAG a common pattern.

Edo Liberty

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Director of Research at AWS and Yahoo.

Role at Pinecone

Edo Liberty founded Pinecone in 2019. As a highly elite AI researcher managing massive machine learning systems at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Yahoo, he realized that traditional databases were completely incapable of handling the highly complex 'vector embeddings' required for modern AI models. He left AWS to build the absolute first purpose-built, cloud-native vector database, perfectly anticipating the explosive rise of generative AI. Edo Liberty was born in 1981.

Pinecone: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Ash Ashutosh

Chief Executive Officer

2025 – Present

Serial founder of Serano Systems, AppIQ and Actifio, bringing 30+ years in storage and data management.

Edo Liberty

Founder & Chief Scientist

2019 – Present

PhD in computer science from Yale; former research director at Yahoo and head of Amazon AI Labs.

Keep researching Pinecone

Who Founded Pinecone? FAQ

Who founded Pinecone?

Edo Liberty founded Pinecone in 2019. He led it as CEO until September 2025 and is now Chief Scientist.

What is Edo Liberty's background?

Liberty holds a PhD in computer science from Yale. He was a research director at Yahoo and then led Amazon AI Labs at AWS before starting Pinecone.

Why did Edo Liberty start Pinecone?

He saw that AI models represent data as vector embeddings but no database was built to store and search them at scale, so he built a managed service for that workload.

What academic and scientific research credentials does founder Edo Liberty possess?

Dr. Edo Liberty holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University. He is an internationally renowned scientist in randomized algorithms, streaming data algorithms, and dimensionality reduction, having published over 75 peer-reviewed papers.

What was Edo Liberty's leadership role at Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

Prior to founding Pinecone, Edo Liberty was Research Director at AWS, where he founded and led the Amazon AI Labs. His teams built core machine learning infrastructure and algorithms for Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Kinesis, and automated data science pipelines.

What was Edo Liberty's contribution during his tenure at Yahoo Research?

At Yahoo Research, Liberty served as Senior Research Director and head of the Media and Scalable Systems Lab, architecting large-scale information retrieval, web search indexing, and real-time streaming algorithms for millions of concurrent users.

How did the founding team distribute engineering between San Francisco and Tel Aviv?

Edo Liberty established Pinecone with corporate and product headquarters in San Francisco, California, while setting up an advanced research and systems engineering campus in Tel Aviv, Israel, recruiting top algorithmic talent from elite Israeli intelligence and academic centers.

What is Edo Liberty's current role and executive focus at Pinecone?

As Executive Chairman and Chief Product Officer, Edo Liberty focuses 100% of his time on pioneering next-generation vector algorithms, sparse-dense hybrid retrieval architectures, and long-term artificial general intelligence memory research.

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Explore Pinecone

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.