On May 15, 2024, according to TechCrunch, San Francisco-based AI database startupLanceDBwith the support of Y Combinator, raised $8 million this month in a seed round led by CRV, Essence VC, and Swift Ventures, bringing its total funding to $11 million.
The company plans to use the raised funds to develop and improve its open-source database software LanceDB.
LanceDB was co-founded by Chang She and Lei Xu in 2022. Chang She is one of the co-creators of Pandas (a widely popular Python data science library). LanceDB's main business is building open-source database software, which is a vector database containing sequences of numbers ("vectors") that encode the meaning of unstructured data (such as images, text, etc.). LanceDB's uniqueness lies in being built on Apache Arrow and adopting a custom data format, the Lance Format, optimized for multimodal AI training and analysis, capable of handling up to billions of vectors and petabytes of text, image, and video data, and allowing engineers to manage various forms of metadata related to these data. Its customers include well-known companies such as Midjourney, Character.ai, and AirTable.
(Source:TechCrunch）