# Zilliz

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/zilliz  
**Vertical:** Data & Analytics  
**Subcategory:** Vector Databases & AI Search  
**Tier:** Challenger  
**Website:** zilliz.com  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14

## Summary

Creator of Milvus, most adopted open-source vector database (40K+ GitHub stars, 100M+ downloads). Founded 2017, Redwood City. Raised ~$113-132M. Private.

## Company Overview

Zilliz is an AI infrastructure company founded in 2017 by Charles Xie, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It created and maintains Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database with 40,000+ GitHub stars and 100M+ downloads. Raised approximately $113-132 million including a $60M Series B in August 2022.

Offerings include Milvus (open-source engine) and Zilliz Cloud (managed service). The platform enables vector similarity search for AI applications like recommendation systems, semantic search, NLP, and RAG. 10,000+ enterprise teams use Milvus in production, including NVIDIA, Salesforce, eBay, Airbnb, and DoorDash.

In February 2026, Zilliz Cloud brought BYOC deployment to Microsoft Azure, extending across all major cloud platforms. Milvus saw one of its fastest growth spurts in 2025, competing with Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate. Approximately 140 employees.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is Zilliz and Milvus?
Zilliz created Milvus, the most adopted open-source vector database (40K+ GitHub stars, 100M+ downloads) for AI similarity search and RAG applications.

### How much funding has Zilliz raised?
$113-132M total, including a $60M Series B in August 2022.

### What is Zilliz Cloud vs Milvus?
Milvus is the free open-source engine. Zilliz Cloud is the managed commercial service with enterprise features and BYOC deployment.

### Who uses Milvus?
10,000+ enterprise teams including NVIDIA, Salesforce, eBay, Airbnb, and DoorDash.

### Where is Zilliz based?
Redwood City, California, founded in 2017 by Charles Xie. ~140 employees.

### What is Zilliz and how does it relate to Milvus?
Zilliz is the company behind Milvus, the open-source vector database. Zilliz Cloud is the fully managed cloud service built on Milvus, offering enterprise-grade vector search with automated scaling, backups, and support.

### What AI applications commonly use Zilliz?
Zilliz powers semantic search, recommendation engines, image and video similarity search, RAG-based chatbots, fraud detection, and drug discovery applications where high-dimensional vector similarity search is the core operation.

### How does Zilliz handle billion-scale vector workloads?
Zilliz Cloud uses a disaggregated storage-compute architecture where data is stored in object storage (S3) and compute scales independently, enabling cost-effective billion-vector deployments with sub-100ms query latency.

## Tags

analytics, b2b, saas

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*