What Zilliz does
Zilliz builds Milvus, one of the most widely adopted open-source vector databases, and operates Zilliz Cloud, its fully managed, serverless version. The platform stores and indexes high-dimensional embeddings to power semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), recommendation systems, and AI agent memory. Zilliz Cloud handles approximate nearest-neighbor (ANN) search across billions of vectors with sub-second latency, offering managed scaling, hybrid search, and integrations with the LLM ecosystem.
Ecosystem and adoption
Milvus has tens of thousands of GitHub stars and over 100 million downloads, trusted by thousands of enterprises. Zilliz, founded in 2017 by Charles Xie, has raised roughly $113M across multiple rounds from investors including Prosperity7 Ventures, Temasek's Pavilion Capital, and Hillhouse Capital. Zilliz Cloud provides a free tier plus serverless and dedicated plans, with Python, Node.js, and REST APIs and integrations for Hugging Face, LlamaIndex, LangChain, and OpenAI, making it a core retrieval layer for AI builders.