Pinecone

Edo Liberty: from research at AWS and Yahoo to founding a startup

Pinecone was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty, who had previously served as head of Amazon's AI lab (AWS AI Labs) and as a research director at Yahoo. The company is registered in the United States, with headquarters in New York and a development office in Tel Aviv. That is why it counts as Israeli under the development-center test, not the place-of-registration test.

What a vector database is, and why RAG needs one

Models turn text, images or sound into a sequence of numbers called an embedding, in which geometric closeness reflects closeness in meaning. A vector database stores millions of such embeddings and quickly returns the items most similar to a query. Without this infrastructure it is hard to build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), in which a language model pulls relevant documents from an external store before it writes an answer.

From research niche to standard infrastructure: from $28 million to $750 million

Pinecone was one of the first to offer vector search as a managed cloud service, at a time when it was still considered a research niche. In March 2022 it raised $28 million in a Series A round. In April 2023, as the generative wave rose, it raised $100 million in a Series B round at a valuation of about $750 million: four times the valuation set a year earlier.

September 2025: Liberty becomes chief scientist, Ashutosh becomes CEO

According to an official announcement Pinecone published in its newsroom, on 8 September 2025 the company appointed Ash Ashutosh, an entrepreneur and experienced CEO of three previous companies, as its new CEO. Edo Liberty, the founder, moved to the role of chief scientist to lead the mission he set for the company: "to make AI knowledgeable." Ashutosh focused on growing the company's market share in the category it had created itself.

Competition in a category the company defined

In September 2025 the company reported more than 5,000 customers, in a market that has become much more competitive. Established databases added vector search as an extra feature, and open-source libraries offer it for free. Pinecone is among the companies that defined a new category and then had to deal with larger players entering that same category, a familiar pattern in the software industry.