Weaviate was founded in 2019 by Bob van Luijt and Etienne Dilocker in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The company develops an open-source vector database that stores both objects and their vector embeddings, enabling fast similarity search and hybrid keyword-vector queries.
The company raised over $67 million, including a $50 million Series B led by Index Ventures in 2023. Weaviate’s open-source approach has attracted a strong developer community, with thousands of GitHub stars and active contributors.
Weaviate stands out for its modular architecture — users can plug in different vectorization models (from OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, or local models) directly within the database, eliminating the need to manage separate embedding pipelines. It also supports multi-tenancy, making it suitable for SaaS applications where each customer’s data must remain isolated.
The database runs natively on Kubernetes and offers a fully managed cloud service. Customers include enterprise teams building RAG systems, recommendation engines, and classification pipelines. Weaviate’s GraphQL-based API and strong Python/JavaScript clients have made it especially popular among ML engineers who want more control than a closed-source managed service provides. The company employs around 100 people across offices in Amsterdam and distributed teams globally.
