Zilliz

Zilliz, founded in 2017 by Charles Xie, is the company behind Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database.

Updated 46 days ago Reviewed by 7wData

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Zilliz develops open-source and cloud-managed vector databases that help organizations build AI applications using unstructured data.

Zilliz, founded in 2017 by Charles Xie, is the company behind Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database. With over 40,000 GitHub stars and more than 10,000 enterprise teams in production, Zilliz dominates the vector database space. The company has raised $113 million across four funding rounds, with a Series B extension of $60 million in August 2022 led by Prosperity7 Ventures.

Charles Xie, who spent over six years as a software engineer at Oracle before founding Zilliz, created Milvus to manage vector embeddings at scale—addressing the core infrastructure need for AI applications running retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, recommendation systems, and other embedding-heavy workloads. Zilliz operates Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed "Vector Lakebase" platform, which unifies real-time vector search, lake-scale discovery, and AI data operations. The cloud offering is available across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud with 29 global regions, delivering up to 50,000 queries per second with sub-millisecond latency while managing billions of vectors.

In 2025, Zilliz shipped significant updates: Milvus 2.5 introduced native hybrid search combining lexical and semantic retrieval; Milvus 2.6 focused on cost efficiency with tiered storage reducing expenses by 50%; and the company expanded European cloud infrastructure to Azure North Europe. In March 2026, Zilliz launched Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) for enterprise data sovereignty, separating key ownership from data processing for regulated industries. The company, headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with 139 employees as of March 2026, was named "Highest Performer" and "Easiest to Use" in G2's Summer 2025 Grid Report for Vector Databases—the only vendor to achieve top rankings in both categories.

Notable customers include PayPal, Walmart, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Filevine, eBay, Airbnb, and DoorDash. Filevine, a legal tech platform, achieved 60-80% time savings for attorneys and processes 20 million document pages daily using Zilliz Cloud.

Who buys this

Enterprise software and SaaS platforms needing semantic search and recommendation systems
Regulated industries (legal, financial) requiring data sovereignty and encryption key control
E-commerce and ad tech requiring image and product similarity search
AI infrastructure teams deploying retrieval-augmented generation and LLM applications at scale
Large tech companies optimizing recommendation and personalization workloads

Publicly disclosed clients

NVIDIA
Walmart
Salesforce
PayPal
DoorDash
Airbnb
eBay
Filevine

Strengths and what to watch

Strengths

Open-source traction: Milvus has 40,000+ GitHub stars and 100+ million downloads, giving Zilliz deep enterprise adoption without lock-in
Production scale at lower cost: Tiered storage and quantization reduce infrastructure costs by 50% while handling billions of vectors at sub-50ms latency
Enterprise feature completeness: CMEK, BYOC, 99.95% SLA, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA-readiness, and GDPR compliance address regulated industries overlooked by competitors

Watch for

Customer concentration risk: Heavy reliance on Fortune 500 and big-tech customers; churn in any major customer could signal broader market slowdown
Market saturation: Vector database market is crowded (Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, Chroma); Zilliz's advantage is Milvus adoption, but SaaS migration requires active sales motion that isn't disclosed
No recent funding since August 2022: $113M total with 139 employees suggests either strong unit economics or slowing growth; IPO or Series C timing and terms unknown

Recent moves

Key Information

Industry: Vector Databases
Founded: 2017
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Zilliz and what does it do?

Zilliz develops open-source and cloud-managed vector databases that help organizations build AI applications using unstructured data. The company operates Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database, alongside Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed Vector Lakebase platform for real-time vector search and lake-scale data discovery.

What is Milvus and why is it widely used?

Milvus, developed by Zilliz, is the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database. With over 40,000 GitHub stars and more than 100 million downloads, Milvus powers vector search, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, and other embedding-heavy AI workloads at production scale.

What are the key features of Zilliz Cloud?

Zilliz Cloud delivers 50,000 queries per second with sub-millisecond latency while managing billions of vectors. Features include hybrid search combining lexical and semantic retrieval, tiered storage reducing costs by 50%, Customer-Managed Encryption Keys for data sovereignty, and 29 global regions on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

How do companies use Zilliz for AI applications?

Companies use Zilliz for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation with LLMs, recommendation systems, product similarity search, and personalization. Zilliz serves enterprise software platforms, regulated industries, e-commerce, ad tech, and AI infrastructure teams. Customers include PayPal, Walmart, Salesforce, NVIDIA, DoorDash, and Airbnb.

What compliance features does Zilliz offer for regulated industries?

Zilliz addresses regulated industries with SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA readiness, GDPR compliance, Customer-Managed Encryption Keys, and Bring Your Own Cloud deployment. These features enable financial, legal, and healthcare organizations to meet data sovereignty, encryption key control, and regulatory requirements while using Zilliz Cloud.

What results have Zilliz customers achieved?

Filevine, a legal tech platform, achieved 60-80% time savings for attorneys and processes 20 million document pages daily using Zilliz Cloud. Zilliz has over 10,000 enterprise teams in production and customers including PayPal, Salesforce, NVIDIA, Walmart, eBay, Airbnb, and DoorDash deploying vector search at scale.

How Zilliz compares

Direct head-to-head against 3 competitors. Picked by 7wData.

Positioning: Zilliz develops open-source and cloud-managed vector databases that help organizations build AI applications using unstructured data.
Customer segments: Enterprise software and SaaS platforms needing semantic search and recommendation systems
Strengths: Open-source traction: Milvus has 40,000+ GitHub stars and 100+ million downloads, giving Zilliz deep enterprise adoption without lock-in
Watch for: Customer concentration risk: Heavy reliance on Fortune 500 and big-tech customers; churn in any major customer could signal broader market slowdown
Recent moves: Zilliz Cloud Launches Native Cross-Region Disaster Recovery for Vector Databases

Positioning: Fully managed, serverless vector database for teams wanting zero infrastructure operations on production AI retrieval workloads.
Customer segments: Enterprise SaaS and Fortune 500 AI teams, US-centric; buyer persona is ML engineering lead or platform infrastructure owner.
Strengths: First managed vector database to market; serverless tier scales to zero, removing idle infrastructure cost for bursty or variable workloads.
Watch for: Sale process reported by The Information (August 2025); founder-to-external CEO handoff adds roadmap and strategic direction uncertainty for buyers.
Recent moves: Founder Edo Liberty moved from CEO to Chief Scientist; Ash Ashutosh, former Google executive, named CEO, August 2025.

Positioning: Open-source modular vector database targeting multimodal AI applications; positions as embedding-provider-agnostic infrastructure for production retrieval.
Customer segments: Enterprise AI teams at financial services, travel, and e-commerce firms; FactSet and Booking.com in production; buyer is ML platform engineer.
Strengths: Native multimodal collections span text, images, and audio; modular vectorizer API decouples embedding selection from data storage and retrieval logic.
Watch for: No disclosed funding since April 2023 Series B; three-year runway pressure coincides with hyperscalers adding native vector search to their platforms.
Recent moves: AWS Strategic Collaboration Agreement signed May 2025; over 20 documented joint customer wins including FactSet and Booking.com cited at launch.

Positioning: Rust-built open-source vector database positioning on memory efficiency and composable vector search as core production AI infrastructure.
Customer segments: Engineering-led teams at scale-up and enterprise companies including Canva, HubSpot, Tripadvisor, and Bosch; buyer is senior backend or ML engineer.
Strengths: Rust implementation benchmarks lower memory per stored vector than Python-based peers; index-time payload filtering avoids post-query scan overhead at billion-scale.
Watch for: Enterprise deployment options, CMEK, and compliance certifications still in development per March 2026 Series B announcement; trails Zilliz on regulated-industry readiness.
Recent moves: Raised $50M Series B led by Advance Venture Partners, March 2026; Bosch Ventures joined as new strategic investor.

Sources

www.prnewswire.com — Milvus GitHub stars milestone, enterprise adoption (NVIDIA, Salesforce, eBay, Airbnb, DoorDash), Milvus 2.5 and 2.6 features
www.prnewswire.com — G2 Summer 2025 recognition, Zilliz Cloud performance metrics (50,000 QPS), customer base size (10,000+ organizations)
siliconangle.com — BYOC feature availability, data residency and compliance capabilities, Charles Xie quote on market positioning
www.prnewswire.com — Filevine customer case study, 60-80% time savings metric, document processing scale (20 million pages daily)
www.prnewswire.com — CMEK feature launch, enterprise data sovereignty positioning, AWS availability
www.crunchbase.com — Funding history, Series B amount ($43M in 2020), Series B Extension ($60M in 2022), Prosperity7 Ventures and Temasek investment
www.unite.ai — Charles Xie founder and CEO role, background in database systems
zilliz.com — Customer list including PayPal, AT&T, Walmart, Salesforce, Sanofi, IBM, NVIDIA