SeMI Technologies secured $16 Million in Series A funding

SeMI Technologies, a Netherlands-based provider of open source Weaviate vector-search database, has recently secured $16 million in a Series A funding round.

SeMI Technologies was founded by Bob Van Luijt. It builds core software infrastructure for AI-first applications. Weaviate is an open-source vector search engine that stores both the vectors and objects, which allows for combining vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database, all accessible via REST, GraphQL, and various language clients.

CEO of SeMI Technologies, Bob Van Luijt, said, "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."

Tony Florence, Managing General Partner, Technology at NEA, said, "We've been closely watching ML and AI advancements and waiting for the right team and product to reinvent how we work with data. The Weaviate Vector Database enables users to interact with unstructured data as vectors across text, audio, and images, which unlocks incredibly powerful use cases. We're thrilled to partner with Bob and the SeMi Technologies team to democratize access to new data applications— from neural semantic search to vector-based recommender systems and more."

The round was backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Cortical Ventures.

This new investment also follows a previously unannounced $1.6 million funding backed by Zetta Ventures Partners with ING Ventures.

The startup, as of now, has plans to use the new funds to focus on making Weaviate the de facto standard in an open-source vector search, notes the announcement.