Chinese startup Zillis offering the Milvus vector database for AI apps raises $60 million

Oluwajuwonlo Afolabi -

Zillis, a Chinese startup offering the Milvus open-source vector database for AI apps, has raised $60 million in its Series B extension round and is now moving to the West with a new headquarters in San Francisco, to increasingly meet the demand for efficient technique processing tools to use unstructured data for AI-powered applications.

  • The fund will be used to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and advance its commitment to open source and further develop its managed cloud offering, the SaaS startup claims.  
  • The vector database (Milvus) from the company is a new type of technology designed to store, manage, and search embedding vectors. Vector databases are being used in a large number of applications such as image search, recommender systems, text understanding, video summarization, drug discovery, stock market analysis, and many others.
  • According to Zillis, Milvus software has now passed 1 million in downloads as against the 300,000 it had last year. The production users of the software also increased by 300% in the same timeframe.
  • Prosperity7 Ventures led the funding round, with participation from Temasek's Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, and Yunqi Capital. Zillis last raised $43 million in 2020 to scale its business and prepare to launch in the US market.