LanceDB aims to solve the problems AI teams face with traditional data infrastructure, freeing them to focus on model development and business value. The company makes money by selling fully managed versions of its open-source software with added features such as hardware acceleration and governance controls. Despite recent VC backing, Chang insists that the company's focus will remain on the open-source project, which currently sees around 600,000 downloads per month.
Key takeaways:
- Chang She, a Cloudera veteran and co-creator of the Python data science library Pandas, has co-launched LanceDB with software engineer Lei Xu. LanceDB is an open source database software designed to support multimodal AI models.
- LanceDB recently raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by CRV, Essence VC and Swift Ventures, bringing its total raised to $11 million. The company is backed by Y Combinator.
- The software is built on Apache Arrow and uses a custom data format, Lance Format, optimized for multimodal AI training and analytics. It can handle up to billions of vectors and petabytes of text, images, and videos.
- LanceDB makes money by selling fully managed versions of its open source software with added features. Its customer list includes Midjourney, Character.ai, WeRide, and Airtable. Despite recent VC backing, the company will continue to focus on its open source project.