Chroma is an open-source, AI-native search database that supports vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search in a single engine. Built on object storage with automatic data tiering, it offers serverless, scalable infrastructure used by millions of developers building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications and AI agents.
The project ships as an Apache 2.0-licensed open-source library that can be embedded directly in Python or JavaScript applications, run as a server, or consumed as a managed cloud service. Chroma Cloud is the company's hosted offering, with SOC 2 Type II compliance for enterprise customers. The product is widely adopted across the LangChain, LlamaIndex, and broader AI tooling ecosystems.
Chroma was co-founded in 2022 by Jeff Huber, who serves as CEO, and Anton Troynikov, who now serves as an advisor. Both bring machine learning backgrounds from companies including Nuro and Samsara. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.
In April 2023 Chroma raised an $18 million seed round led by Astasia Myers at Quiet Capital, with angel investors including Naval Ravikant, Max and Jack Altman, Jordan Tigani (MotherDuck), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Akshay Kothari (Notion), Amjad Masad (Replit), and Spencer Kimball (CockroachDB), among others. Total reported funding is approximately $20.3 million.
Chroma's differentiator is its 'AI-native' framing: rather than retrofit vector search onto a legacy database, Chroma was built from the ground up for AI workloads, with a developer-first API, an open core, and a single engine that combines multiple search modalities. This positions it against Pinecone, Weaviate, and Qdrant, while leaning into the open-source community for distribution.