publive-image

Marqo, a leading innovator in generative AI technology, has successfully secured $12.5 million 

Marqo, a startup that provides a vector search platform for building generative AI applications, has raised US$12.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from Blackbird Ventures, January Capital, and Chronosphere founder and CTO Rob Skillington. The funding will be used to advance the adoption of Marqo's platform, which enables developers and enterprises to unlock the value of unstructured data across various domains and use cases.

Unstructured data, such as text, images, audio, and video, makes up more than 80 percent of all enterprise data, according to Gartner. However, most of this data remains untapped or underutilized, as traditional search tools and databases are not designed to handle its complexity, diversity, and volume. Vector search, a technique that converts unstructured data into numerical representations called vectors, offers a solution to this challenge, as it allows for faster, more accurate, and more relevant search and retrieval of data.

Marqo's platform simplifies and streamlines the process of deploying vector search, by handling the entire workflow from embedding generation to storage and retrieval, through a single API. Marqo's platform leverages state-of-the-art machine learning models to generate high-performance vectors that can capture the semantic and contextual meaning of unstructured data. Marqo's platform also supports multimodal and multilingual search, enabling users to search across different types of data and languages.

Marqo's platform can be used to power various generative AI applications, such as end-user search, retrieval-augmented generation, content creation, recommendation systems, and more. Marqo's platform can help businesses improve their user experience, customer satisfaction, and revenue, by delivering more relevant and up-to-date content and insights. Some of Marqo's customers include Shopify, Spotify, Netflix, and The New York Times.

We founded Marqo because we recognized that vector search would be instrumental in realizing the full potential of AI in our daily lives, but it is far too complex for companies and developers to deploy," said Tom Hamer, CEO and co-founder of Marqo, in a press release. We recognized the need to develop a platform that not only produced superior vector embeddings but also enabled customers to design complex search experiences in minutes rather than months. This funding is a validation of our approach and will help us scale up to meet the tremendous demand we're seeing.

Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed, said in the press release that Marqo's platform is transforming the way businesses handle unstructured data, by making vector search accessible and scalable. Marqo's mission is to bring this transformational technology to every business in the world through a simple developer API and an enterprise-grade platform offered on-prem and on the cloud, said the company's chief executive officer. Their early growth has been phenomenal, and we are thrilled to back this amazing team helping consumers to search the way they think.

Marqo, formed in 2021, has raised US$17.8 million to date. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Melbourne, employs 25 people.  Marqo offers open-source access to its core code for developers, as well as a fully managed cloud service, Marqo Cloud, for enterprises. Marqo also provides a web demo on Hugging Face, where users can try out its vector search capabilities.