Zilliz

zilliz.com

HQ: Redwood City, California, United States

200

Technology

Company research

Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals

Updated Aug 16, 2026

Overview

Zilliz is a privately held AI infrastructure company founded by the engineers behind Milvus, an open-source vector database. It develops database technology for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), recommendations, and other enterprise AI applications.

Primary product

Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed, multi-cloud vector database service powered by Milvus; the company also stewards the open-source Milvus vector database.

Founded

2017

Headquarters

Redwood City, California, United States

Team size

51-200

Industry

Software Development

Sub-industry

Vector databases and AI data infrastructure

Offices

Redwood City, California, United States

San Francisco, California, United States

Business model

Open-source software

B2B SaaS

Managed cloud database service

Enterprise software licensing and support

Funding

Stage

Late-stage venture-backed / private

Total raised

$113M

Latest round

Series B extension · Aug 2022

Latest amount

$60M

Series B extension

Aug 2022 · Prosperity7 Ventures

$60M

Series B

Nov 2020 · Hillhouse Capital

$43M

Series A

Jan 2018 · 5Y Capital

$10M

Seed Round

Sep 2017

People & investors

Leadership

Charles Xie

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Xiaofan (James) Luan

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer / VP of Engineering

Li Liu

Director of Engineering

Aaron Zhang

Director of Human Resources

Tiffany Nee

Sales Director

Simon Hearne

Founding Solutions Architect, EMEA

Liang Shen

Solution Architect Director

Investors

Work & culture

Public company materials emphasize democratizing AI, open-source development, developer accessibility, performance, cost efficiency, and helping customers move from AI prototypes to production. Detailed employee benefits and internal culture documentation were not publicly verified.

Compensation

Publicly verified compensation ranges were not found. Zilliz has advertised engineering, cloud reliability, database research, and enterprise sales roles, but the retrieved postings did not provide dependable salary data.

Product & market

Pricing

Milvus is free and open source. Zilliz Cloud uses free-tier, pay-as-you-go, and dedicated enterprise plans, with usage-based compute and storage pricing; enterprise offerings include Business Critical, BYOC, compliance, and support features.

Differentiators

—Milvus is an established open-source vector database with broad developer adoption and a large GitHub community.
—Distributed architecture designed for billion-scale vector workloads and low-latency search.
—Hybrid vector and keyword search in one platform, reducing the need to operate separate search systems.
—Managed, multi-cloud deployment across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
—Enterprise features including auto-scaling, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR support, HIPAA readiness, RBAC, SSO, BYOC, backups, and a 99.95% SLA.
—Zilliz claims materially lower infrastructure cost through tiered storage, quantization, and optimized indexing.

Technology

Milvus

C++

Python

Java

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Prometheus

Grafana

Redis

PostgreSQL

MySQL

CockroachDB

Elasticsearch

Nginx

Jenkins

GitHub

GitLab

Customers

NVIDIA

Salesforce

eBay

Airbnb

DoorDash

Over 10,000 organizations and enterprise teams, according to Zilliz company materials

Competitors

Pinecone

Weaviate

Qdrant

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Redis

Vespa

LanceDB

Scale & contact

Estimated revenue

Approximately $1M-$5M annually; an Exa company profile estimates $2.2M, but Zilliz is private and does not publicly report revenue.

Estimated monthly visits

174.3K

Traffic estimate as of Jun 2026

Latest news

Milvus Surpasses 40,000 GitHub Stars, Reinforcing Leadership in Open-Source Vector Databases

PR Newswire / Zilliz · Dec 2025

Zilliz reported that Milvus surpassed 40,000 GitHub stars and that more than 10,000 enterprise teams use Milvus in production AI systems.

Zilliz Selects AWS as Its Strategic Cloud Provider to Power Global Vector Database Solutions

Zilliz Newsroom · Dec 2025

Zilliz announced AWS as its strategic cloud provider and described deployments across nine AWS regions, with Zilliz Cloud serving hundreds of enterprise customers.

Zilliz Cloud Delivers Major Cost Savings, Higher Performance, and Strengthened Security for Enterprise AI

PR Newswire / Zilliz · Oct 2025

The company announced tiered storage, an enterprise Business Critical plan, cross-region backups, an 87% reduction in stated storage pricing, and a 25% compute-price reduction.

Milvus 2.6: Built for Scale, Designed to Reduce Costs

Zilliz Newsroom · Jun 2025

Milvus 2.6 introduced changes intended to reduce storage, compute, operational, and developer costs, including tiered storage and simplified ingestion architecture.

Milvus 2.5 Creates the Best of Both Worlds With Hybrid Vector-Keyword Search

Zilliz Newsroom · Dec 2024

Zilliz announced Milvus 2.5 with integrated vector and keyword search, positioning it as an alternative to maintaining separate semantic-search and full-text-search systems.

Jobs and careers at Zilliz

12 jobs at Zilliz

Senior Recruiter, GTM

Hybrid

People

Redwood City

3w ago

Hybrid

Full-time