SeMI Technologies has adopted the name of its flagship product—the open-source vector-search engine Weaviate. This market-driven name change acknowledges a simple reality: Awareness of the Weaviate brand among developers and customers has outpaced awareness of the company behind it.
“In 2019, my co-founder Etienne Dilocker and I realized that an AI-first infrastructure was needed to serve a growing base of developers. Our idea was to create an umbrella of infrastructure services and products including a vector database that we knew would be essential if promising AI tools like large language models (LLM) were to achieve their potential. We founded SeMI Technologies and Weaviate became our first product.
“Fast forward to today, and Weaviate has become more than a product; it’s now the platform we set out to build. The open-source community has grown; we have customer products in Weaviate Cloud Service, Weaviate Hybrid SaaS; we have integrations with Open AI, Cohere, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and others. In short, Weaviate is far better known than SeMI, so we’ve decided to go forward under that one brand.”
— Bob van Luijt, co-founder, Weaviate (previously, SeMI Technologies)
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The Weaviate vector-search engine is a “third wave” database technology. Data is processed by a machine learning model first, and AI models help process, store, and search through it. As a result, Weaviate excels at searching using natural language and is ideally suited to serve as a memory layer in AI stacks allowing users to create ChatGPT-like experiences with their own data. But Weaviate is not limited to language; it can also search images, audio, video, or even genetic information. The open-source code has been downloaded over 1.6M times.
“As SeMI, the team did a fantastic job of building a community, driving the adoption of its open-source Weaviate product, and establishing it as core part of next-gen AI stacks,” said Igor Taber, Cortical Ventures General Partner and investor in the company’s 2022 Series A round. “Changing the company name to match the product’s is a reflection of their focus and commitment to the Weaviate community.”
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