I’m excited to announce that two former CEOs are joining Pinecone as investors and advisors. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake, and Bob Wiederhold, former CEO of Couchbase, are working closely with me to help Pinecone become the leader in search infrastructure.
Complex data, including unstructured text documents, call and video transcripts, customer histories, images, and audio, is growing. Companies need to search through this data for their search, personalization, and security applications. Yet they struggle to do so because they are stuck with tooling and infrastructure that was designed for more simple, structured text data.
Our customers and companies like them are increasingly using ML models to transform complex data into vector embeddings. Vector embeddings are representations of complex data that enable searching through that data by similarity and semantic meaning. Existing databases can’t support vector search at scale. While a handful of hyperscalers have already implemented this technology, most companies don’t have the time or resources to build and maintain the necessary infrastructure. Pinecone has built a vector database that makes it easy for everyone to leverage this state-of-the-art method of searching through complex data.
Bob Muglia
As the former CEO of data warehousing giant, Snowflake, Bob Muglia led the company to five years of unprecedented growth and raised hundreds of millions in funding. Prior to Snowflake, he served as one of four Division Presidents at Microsoft, managing more than 20% of the company’s revenue including server products and cloud services.
From Bob Muglia:
“Complex data such as images and video are a potential goldmine of business insight. People can intuitively understand the contents of an image but until the advent of advanced analytics and machine learning, these contents have been opaque to business systems. That has now changed but this requires a new kind of infrastructure that intersects databases and AI. Pinecone is an innovator and early mover in this space. I believe what they are building is cutting edge today but will become a well-understood standard in this decade.”
Bob Wiederhold
Bob Wiederhold has more than 25 years of high tech experience, having previously served as CEO of Couchbase, a leader in NoSQL databases, and then its Executive Chairman. From 2002 to 2009, Bob was Chairman and CEO of Transitive, the worldwide leader in cross-platform virtualization with over 20M users, where during his tenure the company was acquired by IBM. Until 2001, Bob served as CEO of Tality Corporation, the worldwide leader in electronic design services whose revenues grew to over $200M.
From Bob Wiederhold:
“Hyperscalers such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon invested years in incorporating vector databases and vector search into their applications. They are already seeing improved business outcomes. The majority of the tech world has either not realized it yet or is struggling to catch up. I’m excited to work with Pinecone on bringing this technology to companies who may lack the time, capital, or bandwidth to build such infrastructures in house.”
Join Us at Pinecone
Bob Wiederhold and Bob Muglia are among the best people in the world to help us scale Pinecone. Their experiences in building great companies map almost exactly to the journey ahead of us. They have already made a huge impact on Pinecone and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
If you want to help us grow Pinecone into the next great innovator of database technology, check out our open roles. We are hiring in several areas including Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, and Product Management. Experience firsthand why the best minds in tech think Pinecone will be the next big thing in data. Come be a part of it.