LanceDB, which counts Midjourney as a customer, is building databases for multimodal AI
Summary
Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. Thats because theyre useful for all manner of AI applications, from content recommendations in ecommerce and social media platforms to reducing hallucinations.The vector database competition is fierce see Qdrant, Vespa, Weaviate, Pinecone and Chroma to name a few vendors (not counting the Big Tech incumbents). Lance Format enables LanceDB to handle up to billions of vectors and petabytes of text, images and videos, and to allow engineers to manage various forms of metadata associated with that data.Until now, theres never been a system that can unite training, exploration, search and large-scale data processing, Chang said. Its not just about storing vectors.LanceDB makes money by selling fully managed versions of its open source software with added features such as hardware acceleration and governance controls and business appears to be going strong. The companys customer list includes text-to-image platform Midjourney, chatbot unicorn Character.ai, autonomous car startup WeRide and Airtable.Chang insisted that LanceDBs recent VC backing wouldnt shift its attention away from the open source project, though, which he says is now seeing around 600,000 downloads per month.We wanted to create something that would make it 10x easier for AI teams working with large-scale multimodal data, he said.