Startup Zilliz Inc., best known as the creator of the Milvus vector database, announced today it has raised $60 million through an extension to its earlier $43 million Series B round of funding.

Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund of Aramco Ventures, led the round, which included participation from existing investors such as Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital and Yunqi Capital. The company has now raised a total of $113 million.

Zilliz is the primary developer of the popular open-source Milvus vector database that’s used to support artificial intelligence applications. A vector database architecture is considered to be superior for AI models, especially machine learning.

That’s because these models typically take unstructured data such as documents, videos and user behaviors and convert them into vectors, which are essentially complex series of numbers. So inference is often a matter of finding which vectors are nearest or most similar to others.

In order to sort through and rank large numbers of vectors, a specialist vector database is required. Traditional databases are designed for tables and documents, so they’re inefficient for machine learning. This is where Milvus can be helpful, with its ability to transform and index millions of vectors dynamically to answer the queries that are commonly thrown at AI models.

“Modern AI algorithms use high-dimensional vectors called embeddings to represent the deep semantics of unstructured data — necessitating a new form of data infrastructure to manage and process them at scale,” Zilliz founder and Chief Executive Charles Xie told SiliconANGLE. “Vector databases fulfill this purpose, providing a unified way to store, index and search across massive quantities of high-dimensional vectors, and further offloading the burden of complex data management from AI application developers.”

Although Milvus is open source, it requires considerable expertise to get it up and running and then keep it ticking. That’s where Ziliz comes in. The company has built a managed version of Milvus known as Zilliz Cloud, which is billed as “a high-performance vector database management system.” As Zilliz points out, the offering is both cloud-native and capable of processing billion-scale vector data in milliseconds.

“Zilliz Cloud is a fully managed database-as-a-service built on the open-source vector database Milvus we created at Zilliz,” Xie added. “Using Milvus as the underlying core, Zilliz Cloud provides an integrated platform for vector data processing, unstructured data analytics and enterprise AI application development.”

Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that Zilliz’s open-source approach stands apart from the vector database pack, since most competing products are built on proprietary underlying platforms. In addition, Zilliz is more scalable than other offerings. That’s a key capability, Thurai said, because it’s not enough just to store vectorized unstructured data. The data also needs to be searchable.

“AI and machine learning models need to be able to search unstructured content in real-time,” he explained. “Enterprises have struggled with searching unstructured data such as images, audio files and PDFs for a long time and AI has the potential to solve this issue. So the data of an image can be vectorized as an array of numbers, or an AI-generated representation of that image. Then, a vector search can be performed on a vector database that stores such information and return either the top search results of the match, or return all results above a certain threshold.”

Thurai said the ability of Zilliz to perform searches on unstructured data leads to multiple possible use cases, such as searching for a very specific image, facial recognition or even finding a voice string match. It means enterprises finally have a way to search through the masses of unstructured data that, until now, they have just been collecting and storing but never using, he added.

“Given the importance of unstructured data search, we’re seeing a lot of investments in small startups offering these kinds of capabilities,” Thurai said. “It is an uphill battle with all of the competition, but open source always wins with traction. Proper monetization of these technologies can be hit or miss though. Hopefully Zilliz will gain traction and find a way to monetize its solution soon.”

For now, Zilliz’s paid offering is currently available on an invitation-only basis in private preview, with select customers helping to test and provide feedback ahead of a general launch sometime next year. Interested companies can apply to access the private preview here. Long-term, Zilliz said its vision is for Zilliz Cloud to become a fully-managed database-as-a-service offering that provides an integrated platform for vector data processing, unstructured data analytics and enterprise AI application development.

“Milvus has now become the world’s most popular open-source vector database with over a thousand end-users,” Xie added. “We will continue to serve as a primary contributor and committer to Milvus and deliver on our promise to provide a fully managed vector database service on public cloud with the security, reliability, ease of use, and affordability that enterprises require.”

Zilliz said it will use the funds from today’s round to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, with an aim to doubling down on its continuous commitment to open source while building out its managed cloud offering.

Prosperity7 Ventures Executive Managing Director Aysar Tayeb hailed Zilliz as a “global leader” in vector similarity search on massive amounts of unstructured data.

“We believe that the company is in a strong position to build a cloud platform around Milvus that will unleash new and powerful business insights and outcomes for its customers, just as data analytics platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have done with structured data,” Tayeb said. “There is already over four times more unstructured data than structured data, a gap that will continue to grow as AI, robotics, IoT and other technologies meld the digital and physical realms.”

Image: Zilliz