Pinecone Officially Launches Serverless Vector Database After Preview Phase

Pinecone, the innovative vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI Labs, has positioned itself as a leader in enhancing large language models (LLMs) with client-specific data. Recently, the company has completely transformed its product offering by launching Pinecone Serverless, a solution designed to relieve customers from the complexities of deployment management and scaling. After a successful beta period, Pinecone Serverless is now generally available.

Liberty highlights a pivotal shift among the company’s early adopters, who are moving beyond experimentation to launching their own AI products. As enterprises navigate the intricacies of building new applications, they also face the challenge of effectively deploying these innovations.

“The first wave of production-grade applications is emerging now and will continue to develop over the next six to nine months. Feedback from our more than 5,000 customers has been clear: they require a specialized, optimized tool tailored for vector search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge extraction, and context generation for language models. Essentially, they need scalability, performance, and affordability to align with their product-building efforts,” Liberty explained.

Liberty emphasized that Pinecone devoted significant resources to ensure the product is suitable for production environments, all while making it remarkably cost-effective. The company asserts that customers utilizing Pinecone Serverless could see their costs reduced by up to 50x, thanks to a complete system overhaul that facilitates a multi-tenant service model, separating storage from compute. This means customers only pay for actual CPU usage, with Pinecone efficiently managing backend capacity.

“Our as-a-service model allows us to charge customers precisely for what they consume—nothing more. This level of precision is both rare and challenging to achieve,” Liberty stated.

In response to feedback from customers during the public preview, Pinecone is also launching Private Endpoints, which offers enterprises a secure, direct connection to their virtual private clouds on Amazon via AWS PrivateLink. This feature ensures data remains shielded from the public internet, maintaining compliance with various governance protocols.

Prominent companies already leveraging Pinecone Serverless include Gong, Help Scout, New Relic, Notion, TaskUS, and You.com.

Notion co-founder and COO Akshay Kothari remarked, “Notion is at the forefront of the AI productivity revolution. The introduction of our pioneering AI feature was made possible by Pinecone Serverless. Their technology powers our Q&A AI to deliver instant responses to millions of users, sourcing information from billions of documents. Importantly, migrating to their latest architecture has reduced our costs by 60%, enabling us to further our mission of making software tool creation accessible to all.”