SeMI Technologies raised $16M Series A financing co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Cortical Ventures.

SeMI Technologies, an Amsterdam, Netherlands-based software startup developing the open-source Weaviate vector-search database, announced closing series A funding round at $16 million.

The money was raised from investors co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Cortical Ventures.

SeMI Technologies, spun out of ING Labs in 2019 by CEO Bob Van Luijt, Etienne Dilocker, and Micha Verhagen, developed Weaviate, a vector search engine that is a unique type of AI-first database using machine learning models outputting vectors, also known as embeddings, hence the name vector search engine. The company offers products and services around its Weaviate open-source solution. These include managed services, a service license agreement, and support. Weaviate has already been downloaded over 700k times (a number growing about 30% per month!) Hundreds of users have applied Weaviate in more than 100 different use cases in technology, finance, media, cybersecurity, health care, and many other industries.

Prior to this round, SeMI Technologies, secured $1.6 million seed financing led by Zetta Venture Partners with ING Ventures also participating, in August 2020.