Former Couchbase CEO joins the company after 15 months as an active advisor and board member
Pinecone, the vector database company providing long-term memory for AI, today announced significant growth in 2022 and that former Couchbase CEO and Executive Chairman Bob Wiederhold has joined as President and COO after 15 months as an active advisor and board member.
Pinecone provides a vector database that acts as the long-term memory for AI applications. It is used by developers alongside AI models — including GPT from OpenAI and other Large Language Models (LLM) — to build accurate and scalable AI applications. Such applications include semantic search and chatbots, product search and recommendations, cybersecurity threat detection, and more.
In its first year of general availability, Pinecone saw surging demand for its vector database — a product category it created — and significant adoption from developers who came to view Pinecone as the obvious choice for a production-grade vector database. By the end of 2022:
- Many thousands of developers started building on Pinecone’s free Starter plan.
- More than 200 paying customers chose Pinecone to enable their large-scale AI applications. Customers include leading companies such as Workday, Xandr (Microsoft), Gong, Course Hero, BambooHR, Expel, and Zapier.
- Pinecone reached millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue (ARR) as new customers went into production and existing customers grew their usage to include other use cases within their organizations.
Amidst this growth — which has accelerated further since the start of 2023 — Bob Wiederhold has joined Pinecone full time. Wiederhold began working closely with Pinecone as an advisor in October 2021, joined the Board in March 2022, and played an increasingly active role at the company for the past year.
“Bob is the best strategist and company operator I have ever worked with, and he just happens to share my passion for deep and transformative technologies,” said Edo Liberty, Founder and CEO of Pinecone. “To maintain and even accelerate our breakneck growth, we need to be just as ambitious and innovative with our business as we are with our technology. Over the past 15 months I’ve come to know Bob as one of the very few people in the world who can help us do that.”
“I have been blown away by the technology Pinecone is delivering and the strength of its Product-Led Growth motion,” said Wiederhold. “There is incredibly rapid growth across all business metrics, from market awareness to developer adoption to paying customers using Pinecone in mission-critical applications. I am ecstatic to join such an elite company operating in such a critical and growing market.”
Wiederhold has been in a CEO role at high-tech companies for most of the past 30 years. Prior to his time at Couchbase, Wiederhold was Chairman and CEO of Transitive, the worldwide leader in cross-platform virtualization with over 20M users, which was acquired by IBM. Before that, he served as CEO of Tality Corporation, the worldwide leader in electronic design services, whose revenues grew to over $200M during his time there.
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