Amsterdam-based startup SeMI Technologies raises €14.1M for its open-source vector search engine Weaviate

Amsterdam-based SeMI Technologies, a developer of the open-source search engine and database Weaviate, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $16M (approx €14.1M) in its Series A round of funding. The funding round was co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Cortical Ventures.

This round follows a previously unannounced $1.6M Seed funding led by Zetta Venture Partners, with participation from ING Ventures, in August 2020.

The Dutch startup’s open-source search engine and database, Weaviate, is based on machine learning (ML) algorithms. The software can come up with smarter suggestions by connecting between texts, images, videos, and audio.

According to the company’s statement, previous databases just stored raw data while Weaviate stores data that is processed by machine learning models, allowing users to better index and search through their data.

Capital utilisation

SeMI Technologies claims that the funding will help grow its team, user community, and roster of partners; increase the number of use cases; and create and fine-tune its ML models and modules.

SeMI Technologies’ CEO Bob Van Luijt says, “This investment will allow us to focus on making Weaviate the de facto standard in open-source vector search. As a bonus, both NEA and Cortical Ventures bring valuable knowledge and experience from OSS “deep tech” companies that will catalyse our growth and product development.”

Igor Taber, General Partner at Cortical Ventures, adds, “Over the next decade, AI-driven applications will transform every industry and every part of our lives, creating trillions of dollars of market value. Weaviate has the potential to be a core database technology powering these applications.”

“Creating open-source, AI-first infrastructure”

Founded in 2019 by Bob Van Luijt, Etienne Dilocker and Micha Verhagen, SeMI Technologies originally spun out of ING Labs and claims to democratise search capabilities that have, until now, been closely guarded by a handful of huge tech companies.

The company’s software gives customers the option of running it on their infrastructure, allowing them to maintain control of their data, safely behind their own firewalls. The software is offered to a wide variety of industries in the form of SaaS and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) licences.

Bob Van Luijt says, “We represent a third wave in database technology. Oracle’s SQL dominance was followed by open-source NoSQL databases pioneered by companies like MongoDB. Weaviate gives any enterprise the advantage of databases built with ML and deep learning at their core. The first use cases have been natural-language ones but we are also exploring images, videos, audio, and even esoteric cases such as graph or gene embeddings.”

Weaviate has been downloaded over 700K times, a number growing about 30 per cent per month, according to the company. Hundreds of users have applied Weaviate in more than 100 different use cases in technology, finance, media, cybersecurity, health care, and many other industries, says the company.