What Jina AI does
Jina AI provides search foundation models and APIs that power retrieval and RAG. Its lineup includes multilingual, multimodal embeddings for vector search; a high-performance reranker to maximize search relevancy; and a Reader API that turns any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown for grounding. The company also offers DeepSearch and search-optimized models, with a developer-friendly approach where many APIs can be used instantly without registration or a credit card.
Background and acquisition
Founded in Berlin in 2020 by Han Xiao and team, Jina AI raised roughly $37M-$39M, including a $30M Series A led by Canaan Partners with GGV Capital and SAP.iO. Its open-source roots in neural search earned wide developer adoption, with clients spanning Salesforce, Alibaba, ByteDance, and others. In October 2025, Jina AI was acquired by Elastic (NYSE: ESTC); its embedding and reranking models continue to operate and are also offered through Elastic's inference services, making Jina a core building block for search and RAG pipelines.