Pinecone

Pinecone develops and operates the eponymous vector database for AI applications and describes itself as "the trusted AI knowledge company"; the company also provides a Pinecone MCP Server, which can be used, among other things, to run full-text search across published articles and documentation.

The platform combines modern models for embedding, planning, and reranking with flexible query mechanisms spanning vector, keyword, and filter search, plus namespaces, to retrieve relevant information from diverse data types. Built on a cloud-native, Rust-based architecture, Pinecone says it scales hands-free to billions of vectors and thousands of queries per second. An object-storage-based architecture intelligently manages data tiering and caching to keep operations cost-efficient, rather than keeping expensive memory provisioned at all times.

The business model is a managed, serverless service with tiered pricing (Starter, Standard, Enterprise) billed per operation rather than by pre-planned capacity — customers pay only for the operations they actually perform.

Pinecone was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty, is headquartered in New York, and is backed by prominent venture investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures. The company says it serves more than 10,000 customers and over one million developers worldwide.

Pinecone also integrates with common retrieval-augmented generation frameworks and is frequently cited as one of the reference implementations for production-grade vector search at scale, particularly for applications that need to meet strict compliance requirements alongside pure similarity search.