Zilliz
Creators of Milvus, providing fully managed vector database Zilliz Cloud for scalable AI applications.
Updated April 2026
Overview
- Website
- zilliz.com
- Founded
- 2017
- Headquarters
- Redwood City, CA
- Segment
- Vector Databases
- Posture
- Purpose-Built Vector DB
Product overview
Zilliz offers Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed service built on the open-source Milvus vector database, enabling billion-scale vector similarity search for AI use cases like RAG, semantic search, recommendation, and multimodal retrieval . Trusted by over 10,000 enterprises including NVIDIA, Roblox, AT&T, Walmart, and Bosch, it supports deployment on AWS, Azure, GCP with features like 99.95% SLA, SOC2 compliance, and built-in embedding pipelines . Distinct for 10x faster retrieval than standalone Milvus via Cardinal engine, optimized AUTOINDEX, tiered storage, and pay-as-you-go scaling from free tier to enterprise plans .
Revenue model
Pay-as-you-go cloud pricing: Free tier (5GB storage, 2.5M vCUs/month); Dedicated clusters from $7-$65/million vectors/month (tiered-storage to performance-optimized), $0.04/GB/month storage; Serverless per vCU; Enterprise/BYOC plans with discounts for annual commitments .
Moat
Zilliz's key competitive moat is its proprietary enhancements to the open-source Milvus vector database, including the AI-powered Cardinal search engine and AutoIndex technology, which deliver up to 50,000 QPS, sub-millisecond latency, and billion-scale vector handling—10x faster than open-source Milvus alone—while maintaining ease of use and cost efficiency through features like RaBitQ quantization and tiered storage. This combination of Milvus's massive community adoption (35,000+ GitHub stars, 100M+ downloads) for low-risk evaluation, high performance barriers via specialized vector search IP, and cloud-native scalability creates high switching costs and defensible scale advantages in AI workloads like RAG and similarity search.