Charles, founder and CEO of Zilliz, was elected as the new LF AI & Data Foundation Governing Board General Member Representative.

Recently, LF AI & Data, the umbrella foundation of the Linux Foundation has successfully completed a new round of election and is excited to announce the new leaders. 

Charles Xie, founder and CEO of Zilliz, successfully completed his two-year service as the chairperson of the Governing Board. During this election, Junping Du, General Manager of Huawei Cloud & AI Open Source Department, was elected as the new chairperson of the LF AI and Data Governing Board. Charles was elected as the new LF AI & Data Foundation Governing Board General Member Representative, and will continue to serve LF AI & Data.

![image_upimage_upload_load_0.png](https://assets.zilliz.com/image_upimage_upload_load_0_265310269c.png)

###### Charles Xie, founder and CEO of Zilliz.

"We’ve witnessed the accelerated momentum in open source AI and the prosperity of the LF AI & Data community in the past three years. It’s really a privilege to continue serving the community. I hope to help bring the power of AI to every corporation, every organization, and every individual." said Charles.

LF AI & Data is an umbrella foundation of the Linux Foundation that supports open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data. Its mission is to build and support an open AI community, and drive open source innovation in the AI, ML, DL and Data domains by enabling collaboration, sharing best practices, supporting development efforts, and the creation of new opportunities for all the members of the community. After four years of growth, LF AI & Data now has 49 member organizations and hosts 36 open-source projects, becoming one of the most influential open-source organizations in the field of AI.

During this election, Nancy Rausch, Senior Software Manager and Data Scientist in Research & Development at SAS Institute, was re-elected as the LF AI & Data Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Chairperson. Xiaoman (Charlotte) Hu, Director of MindSpore Community at Huawei, was elected as the LF AI & Data Outreach Committee Chairperson.

Zilliz sincerely congratulates LF AI & Data upon the new leadership and hopes that the LF AI & Data community can make greater contributions in developing open-source AI technologies and empowering more AI applications!

*Source: https://lfaidata.foundation/blog/2022/03/08/welcome-lf-ai-newly-elected-leaders-2/*

## About Zilliz

Zilliz is built by the engineers and scientists who created LF AI Milvus®, an open-source vector database for production ready AI. On a mission to unleash data insights with AI, the company builds the database and search technologies to help organizations create AI/ML applications stunningly easy and fast. By taking the burden of complex data infrastructure management off our users, Zilliz is committed to bringing the power of AI to every corporation, every organization and every individual.

Founded in 2017 by former Oracle engineers, Zilliz is backed by Hillhouse Capital, Pavilion Capital, 5Y Capital, Yunqi Partners, and others.


small_image_upimage_upload_load_0.png

thumbnail_image_upimage_upload_load_0.png

image_upimage_upload_load_0.png

Charles, founder and CEO of Zilliz, was elected as the new LF AI & Data Foundation Governing Board General Member Representative

 LF AI & Data Announces Newly Elected Leaders

Zilliz team has won the first place in the Disk-based ANN Search track in NeurIPS 2021.

On December 6th, 2021, the world's top AI academic conference, NeurIPS announced the result of its first Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) Search Challenge. [Zilliz](https://zilliz.com/) research team has won the first place in the Disk-based ANN Search track with its Disk Performance Optimization Algorithm, leveraging the ANN search on billion-scale datasets to a higher altitude.

![email 1.png](https://assets.zilliz.com/email_1_b1453f6b5c.png)

The emergence of neural networks enables massive unstructured data such as speech, images, and videos to be embedded as vectors, making ANN search the key to understand these unstructured data. Led by experts and scholars from Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Yandex and other influential organizations, the first ANN Search Challenge attracted candidates from Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, Intel, NVIDIA, Kuaishou Technology, and more. A total of six billion-scale datasets were adopted as the example datasets in the challenge, and four of them were released by Facebook, Microsoft Turing, Microsoft Bing, and Yandex specifically for this event.

The Disk-based ANN Search Solution Block-based ANN (BBAnn), developed by the research team of Zilliz, ranked first in the ANN Search track of the Challenge. Its performance peaked during the search in the SimSearchNet++ dataset released by Facebook. This dataset simulates an accurate detection of subtle changes in image, posing a great challenge of retrieving all vectors within a certain radius around the target vector. To make the challenge tougher, the number of query results to return remained uncertain. According to the test result, Zilliz's solution retrieved 88.573% of all the relevant results in the dataset, far beyond the baseline of 16.274%, marking a huge breakthrough in billion-scale ANN search.

In the future, Zilliz will be dedicated to the implementation of this research achievement in Milvus, an open source vector database, to cater to the needs of users from different application scenarios. Milvus is a graduate project of the LF AI & Data Foundation. Milvus is capable of managing a large number of unstructured datasets, and has a wide range of applications in new drug discovery, recommender systems, chatbots, and more. Zilliz will continue to invest in unlocking the hidden value of massive unstructured data for enterprises through open source and cloud-native solutions.



large_1.png

medium_1.png

small_1.png

thumbnail_1.png

1.png

Zilliz Triumphed in Billion-Scale ANN Search Challenge of NeurIPS 2021

Withdrew from Oracle to zero in on unstructured data processing

SYNC 2021, hosted by PingWest, culminated in success recently. Themed on "Reshape the Future", the conference is committed to establishing a new global consensus on the roaring ambition and resounding success of Chinese entrepreneurs in the global market.

In the session "New Opportunities: How Asian Entrepreneurs Change the World",  Charles Xie, CEO and founder of Zilliz, shared the stumble and fall while founding Zilliz and his key to business success.  Other presenters included Brad Bao, Co-founder and Chairman of Lime, Jun Pei, CEO and Co-founder of Cepton, and Lake Dai, Partner at LDV Partners Adjunct.

Charles is an experienced database expert, immersing himself in database development for over 20 years. Prior to his entrepreneurial expedition with Zilliz, Charles worked for years at Oracle's US headquarters, where he was responsible for the development of Oracle relational database systems. He is a founding member of the Oracle 12c cloud database project, which proved to be a huge business success with cumulative revenue exceeding 10 billion dollars. Later, Charles seized the opportunity and founded Zilliz, an open source software company specializing in the development of AI unstructured data processing and analysis systems. Its core product, Milvus vector database, is a graduate project of the LF AI & Data Foundation. Milvus is widely used in intelligent question answering systems, recommender systems, image and video retrieval, intelligent pathological analysis, new drug discovery, and many other fields. With the 43-million-dollar financing led by Hillhouse Ventures, Zilliz set a record for the largest single Series B financing in the world of open source infrastructure software.

Behind the glamorous experience is the constant trial and error of Charles and his team. Charles sincerely shared the doubts, challenges, and difficulties he has faced with young entrepreneurs, and encouraged them to always challenge and stay true to themselves. He said: "Don't be afraid when you find that your idea goes against the grain. Will you set your foot on a totally different road if you persist on it?"

Currently, Zilliz is committed to developing a market and [actively hiring talents](https://app.mokahr.com/apply/zilliz/37974#/) in Silicon Valley. Please stay tuned.

Click [here](https://youtu.be/K6in7Y2h_U8?t=5136) to check out the conference footage.


large_What are Vector Databases_.png

medium_What are Vector Databases_.png

small_What are Vector Databases_.png

thumbnail_What are Vector Databases_.png

What are Vector Databases_.png

Zilliz CEO Shared Start-up Experience in 2021 SYNC

Applied ML & AI for Database Systems and Application.

What are the major breakthroughs in database industry in 2021?

This August, Zilliz was invited to VLDB Workshop 2021 to share its latest research progress and achievement in applying machine learning methods to database systems in company with Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, Tsinghua University, Microsoft and many other organizations. Zilliz senior researcher, Dr. Xiaomeng Yi introduced the development background, design ideas, challenges and technological innovations during the development of Milvus, an open source vector database.

VLDB, SIGMOD and ICDE are known as the three most prestigious conferences in the database field. Recently, the research result by Zilliz research team, Milvus: A Purpose Built Vector Data Management System, was selected by SIGMOD and included as one of the 21 papers this year due to the excellent underlying functionality and perfect application in business scenarios of Milvus.

Every day, the world produces a huge amount data, of which more than 80% is unstructured data that is difficult to process. Whereas traditional databases can only store structured data, the Milvus engineer team proposed a hypothesis: all data can be uniformly represented by vectors at the semantic level regardless of the data types. Dr. Yi remarked that if the AI neural network model is used to extract the semantics of data and present them uniformly as vectors, the processing logic of many data can be directly executed on the level of vectors.

Milvus is designed specifically for analysis and retrieval of massive feature vectors. It provides a complete framework for vector data update, indexing and similarity search, which not only can be performed in real time on streaming data, but also meets the diverse search requirements in actual business scenarios. Until now, Milvus has released two versions: 1.0 and 2.0. The source code of Milvus is completely open source on [GitHub](https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus) and has been widely used in the frontier fields of artificial intelligence. Tested by 1,000 users around the world, its performance greatly surpasses the peer products.

In the sharing, Dr. Yi introduced the design concept of Milvus 2.0: cloud-native, log-as-data, and unified batch-and-stream processing. On the basis of its predecessor, Milvus 2.0 provides users with an intelligent, stable and smooth search experience.

Facing the two major challenges of index selection and data tuning in database development, Dr. Yi believes that AI can open doors to best solutions. For example, new configuration can be first tested and evaluated on a small dataset, and then transferred to a large dataset. Use machine learning to analyze the existing dataset, and guide the configuration of the new dataset, so as to achieve better performance than that of the current BOHB algorithm.

Dr. Xiaomeng Yi (Ph.D. of Computer Architecture, Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Senior Researcher and Research team leader of Zilliz. His research concentrates on high-dimension data management, large-scale information retrieval, and resource allocation in distributed systems. Dr. Yi's research works have been published on leading journals and international conferences including IEEE Network Magazine, IEEE/ACM TON, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDCS, and ACM TOMPECS.


Zilliz attended VLDB Workshop 2021

A refactored, cloud-native version of Milvus is available now. Build powerful and efficient AI applications and power vector similarity search with the world's most advanced vector database. 

On June 28, 2021, [LF AI & Data](https://lfaidata.foundation/), an umbrella foundation of the Linux Foundation supporting open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data, released version 2.0 of its open-source vector database [Milvus](https://milvus.io/). Milvus 2.0 is a cloud-native, full redesign of Milvus 1.0, and a leap forward in the iterative process of optimizing vector database architectures for AI and MLOps.

Xiaofan Luan, Director of Engineering at Zilliz, summarized the redesign as an effort to build a future-proof version of vector database: cloud-native, flexible, and forever easy to use. 

"Only architectures supporting storage and computing disaggregation can take full advantage of elasticity of public clouds," Luan argued, "As a cloud-ready vector database, Milvus 2.0 is resilient, manageable, and observable. It employs the microservice design and relies on Kubernetes and cloud services to achieve component orchestration."

He then moved on to the flexibility feature of this new release: "Milvus 2.0 supports both scalar and vector data and enables hybrid search between them to leverage synergy between structured and unstructured data. Unlike Milvus 1.0, which has eventual consistency only, Milvus 2.0 supports tunable consistency at the request level to support more scenarios. Moreover, Milvus 2.0 has introduced the unified Lambda architecture to integrate the processing of incremental and historical data."

"Making our vector database easy to use is always on the top of our list," claimed Xiaofan. Of all the initiatives designed specifically to facilitate user journey with Milvus, he cited the object relational mapping (ORM) encapsulation of the Python client as an attempt to close the gap between the proof of concept (PoC) for AI algorithms and the real production. He also pointed out that, unlike Milvus 1.0, which requires a cluster sharding middleware solution Mishards to scale, Milvus 2.0 is born for massive-scale datasets and guarantees linear scalability. 

According to Luan, optimizing vector retrieval costs on massive datasets is the biggest challenge facing the space. The Milvus team is planning on introducing heteogeneous hardware acceleration at the physical layer to reduce CPU overhead and the overall costs. "Milvus has roots in building databases designed specifically for AI, and this remains a primary goal of the project," the ambitious Director continued, "We will follow the motto 'AI for DB' and look to replacing knob tuning of parameters with AI-enabled system-parameter tuning to further reduce learning costs for our users."

Milvus 2.0 is the world's most advanced open-source vector database built on a cloud-native architecture that completely disaggregates storage from computation, making it easy to scale in any AI or MLOps scenario. Milvus 2.0 is available now on [GitHub](https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus). To learn more about the design, key features, and future plans for Milvus check out the [Zilliz blog](https://zilliz.com/blog/milvus2.0-redefining-vector-database). 

 

**Contact**

Please contact Jingyu Zhang by email at pr@zilliz.com.

large_2.0 cover.jpg

medium_2.0 cover.jpg

small_2.0 cover.jpg

thumbnail_2.0 cover.jpg

2.0 cover.jpg

This fresh redesign overcomes the limitations of previous versions of Milvus and addresses the evolving needs of unstructured data processing.

LF AI & Data Launches Milvus 2.0, An Advanced Cloud-Native Vector Database Built for AI

Learn Dr. Guo’s perspective on the challenges of developing AI vector databases and system infrastructure.

The 20th ChinaSys workshop was held in Hangzhou from May 22 to 23, 2021. Zilliz partner and system architect Dr. Guo Rentong was invited to the workshop to deliver a keynote speech “AI x Database: Search and Analytics in Embedding Spaces”.

[ChinaSys workshop](https://easychair.org/cfp/ChinaSys20th) is a leading international forum focusing on state-of-the-art research results in the area of computer systems. The workshop covers a wide range of topics spanning operating systems, computer architecture, virtualization, distributed systems, computer networks, system security, cloud computing, edge computing, and programming languages. The conference agenda included talks from renowned researchers, “best of the rest” talks covering top research papers from similar, top-level conferences, as well as peer-reviewed talks on the latest progress happening in the community. 

![image-20210531-022604.png](https://assets.zilliz.com/image_20210531_022604_83401c361d.png)
*Dr. Guo Rentong (far left) at the 20th China Sys workshop.*

 

In his keynote, Dr. Guo started with “embedding as a new source of data,” and then shared his thoughts on the challenges in the AI and vector database sector.

During his presentation Guo said, “In the past several decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in the volume of data, especially unstructured data. Data types vary wildly, making processing and analyzing such data a great challenge. Building a specialized database for each data type would making operational costs prohibitively expensive.” Guo continued, “We believe it is necessary to build a highly efficient vector database that can process and manage all types of embedding vectors converted from unstructured data by various AI models.”

After mentioning several mature open-source AI projects in the industry, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Kubeflow, he introduced Milvus, an open-source vector database designed specifically to work with these AI frameworks and toolkits.

Dr. Guo also elaborated on several major challenges he observed in the industry:

- The new CAP tradeoff between cost, accuracy, and performance.
- High dimensionality vs. index locality
- Index tradeoffs
- Isolated indexing spaces
- Operations in indexing spaces

[Milvus](https://milvus.io/), the world’s most popular vector database is built by Zilliz to process massive unstructured datasets including images, videos, semantic texts, sound clips, chemical formulae and more. It is currently an incubation-stage project at the LF AI & Data Foundation. The platform's unparalleled efficiency and reliability simplify the process of deploying AI and MLOps at scale. Milvus was released under an open-source in 2019, followed by [the release of Milvus 1.0](https://zilliz.com/news/Milvus-V1.0-is-coming) in March, 2021. A recent research paper titled “[Milvus: A Purpose-built Vector Data Management System](https://zilliz.com/whitepapers/milvus-a-purpose-built-vector-data-management-system)“ has been [accepted](https://zilliz.com/news/New-Zilliz-Research-on-Vector-Data-Management-Accepted-by-SIGMOD) by the 2021 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference. Additionally, Milvus v2.0, the beta version of a distributed vector database, is right around the corner.

![image-20210531-022644.png](https://assets.zilliz.com/image_20210531_022644_12c2dd63fc.png)
*Dr. Guo Rentong making his keynote at the 20th ChinaSys workshop.*

 

**About Dr. Guo Rentong**

Guo Rentong is partner and architect at Zilliz. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer software and theory from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 2017. He is a member of CCF Technical Committee on Distributed Computing and Processing (CCF TCDCP). His works have been published in several top-tier conferences and journals, including Usenix ATC, SIGMOD, ICS, DATE, TPDS. He is the co-author of Milvus, the world’s most popular vector database. Guo focuses on database architecture, distributed systems, cache systems, and heterogenous computing. He is seeking solutions to highly scalable, cost-efficient AI-based data analytics systems.

 

**About ChinaSys**

[ChinaSys](https://chinasys.org/doku.php?id=start) is a community for computer system researchers and practitioners to share resources and exchange ideas. The conference attracts people with interests in operating systems, virtualization, distributed systems, network system security, mobile embedded, cloud computing, many- and multi-core systems, and the interaction between programming languages and computer architecture. ChinaSys currently organizes conferences twice a year to encourage the community to exchange ideas on early research results in these areas.

large_image-20210531-022644.png

medium_image-20210531-022644.png

small_image-20210531-022644.png

thumbnail_image-20210531-022644.png

image-20210531-022644.png

Zilliz Partner and Architect, Dr. Guo, Gave a Keynote Speech at the 20th ChinaSys Workshop

Zilliz, the company behind the world’s most popular vector database Milvus, announced that Dr. Pan Yi joined Zilliz Research Asia (ZRA) as an AI pharmaceutical scientist.  

**SHANGHAI, Apr. 9, 2021** – Zilliz, the company behind the world’s most popular vector database Milvus, announced that Dr. Pan Yi joined Zilliz Research Asia (ZRA) as an AI pharmaceutical scientist.  

Dr. Pan is a pioneer in AI drug discovery. He is AIMBE (American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering) Fellow, RSPH (Royal Society for Public Health) Member, IET (the Institute of Engineering and Technology) Fellow, JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellow, and Changjiang Scholar. He is also a Regents’ Professor of computer science, Associate Dean of College of Arts & Sciences, and the Chair of Biology with Georgia State University. 

Zilliz also released a plan to establish Zilliz Research Asia, a research subsidiary seeking to bring together a galaxy of data scientists, combine their academic research results with industry requirements, and drive innovation for the mainstream and emerging industries. Dr. Pan Yi will lead this initiative and continue to apply AI to pharmaceutical discovery.

Charles Xie, Founder and CEO of Zilliz said, “Professor Pan will undoubtedly boost Zilliz’s ability to optimize artificial intelligence algorithms, and help the pharmaceutical industry better understand unstructured data.”

“I see immense business potential in combining vector analytics with optimized AI algorithms in the area of new drug discovery,” said Pan Yi, “AI drug discovery is an emerging area. Once paired with optimized AI algorithms, Milvus improves efficiency and accuracy in areas far beyond drug discovery. I’m more than happy to make contributions that help realize the firm’s vision of success.”

![dddf7fa4-800f-4cd3-a0f1-1905811b1b77(1).jpg](https://assets.zilliz.com/dddf7fa4_800f_4cd3_a0f1_1905811b1b77_1_f148b4f7ae.jpg)

Dr. Pan Yi discussed challenges and opportunities for AI in bioinformatics and medicine and also described his recent research focus. He started with the common practices of the industry to optimize Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and then juxtaposed approaches his team used to improve the accuracy of AI algorithms, both theoretically and in real-world applications.

Pan Yi argued that prior knowledge or practical human knowledge can greatly improve the predictive ability of an AI model. It will require further study to identify the best approach for representing pratical human knowledge mathematically, and integrating such knowledge into AI models.

After Chinese tech giant Tencent [made its foray](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1194086.shtml) into new drug R&D using AI, Dr. Pan reiterated that the application of AI in pharmaceutical discovery is reaching new heights, and he will help accelerate the process of applying Zilliz’s unstructured data solutions to these scenarios.

thumbnail_cover-Pan.png

cover-Pan.png

Prof. Pan Yi joins Zilliz Research Asia as an AI Pharmaceutical Scientist

We are proud to announce Milvus v1.0, a stable, long-term support version of the world’s most popular open-source vector database. Discover what Milvus v1.0 has to offer, and plans for the platform’s future.

Zilliz is proud to announce the release of Milvus v1.0. After months of extensive testing Milvus v1.0, which is based on a stable version of Milvus v0.10.6, is available for use.

Milvus v1.0 offers the following key features:

- Support for mainstream similarity metrics, including Euclidean distance, inner product, Hamming distance, Jaccard coefficient, and more.
- Integration with, and improvements to, SOTA ANNs algorithms, including Faiss, Hnswlib, Annoy, NSG, and more. 
- Scale-out capability through the Mishards sharding proxy.
- Support for processors commonly used in AI scenarios, including X86, Nvidia GPU, Xilinx FPGA, and more.

See the [Release Notes](https://www.milvus.io/docs/v1.0.0/release_notes.md) for additional Milvus v1.0 features. 

Milvus is an ongoing open-source software (OSS) project. Its first major release has the following implications for users:

- Milvus v1.0 will receive long-term support (3+ years).
- The most stable Milvus release to date is well structured and ready for integration with existing AI ecosystems.

### The first version of Milvus with long-term support

Thanks in part to sponsorship from Zilliz, the Milvus community will provide bug fix support for Milvus v1.0 until December 31st, 2024. New features will be available only in releases following v1.0.

See [The Milvus release guideline](https://milvus.io/docs/v1.0.0/milvus_release_guideline.md) for information about release cadences and more.

### Toolchain enhancements and seamless AI ecosystem integration

Beginning with v1.0, Milvus' toolchain will be a primary development focus. We plan to create the necessary tooling and utilities to meet the needs of the Milvus user community. 

Stability makes integrating Milvus with AI ecosystems a breeze. We are seeking further collaboration between the Milvus community and other AI-focused OSS communities. We encourage contributions to the new AI ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) in Milvus. 

### The future of Milvus

We believe Milvus has a bright future thanks to the following factors:

- Regular contributions from developers in the Milvus community.
- Support for integration with any cloud-native environment.

We have drafted [community charters](https://milvus.io/docs/v1.0.0/milvus_community_charters.md) to help guide, nurture, and advance the Milvus community as our technology and user base grows. The charters include several technical decisions made to attract more participants to the community.

- Golang will now be used to develop the Milvus engine however, the ANNS algorithm component will still be developed in C++.
- The forthcoming distributed version of Milvus will use existing cloud components as much as possible.

We are thrilled to partner with the open-source software community to build the next-generation cloud data fabric made for AI. Let's get to work!

### Don’t be a stranger

- Find or contribute to Milvus on [GitHub](https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/)
- Interact with the community via [Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/milvusio/shared_invite/zt-e0u4qu3k-bI2GDNys3ZqX1YCJ9OM~GQ).
- Connect with us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/milvusio).

large_Milvus.jpeg

medium_Milvus.jpeg

small_Milvus.jpeg

thumbnail_Milvus.jpeg

Milvus.jpeg

Milvus v1.0 is available now. This stable, long-term support version powers image/video search, chatbots, and many more AI applications.

Milvus 1.0: The World's Most Popular Open-Source Vector Database Just Got Better

It is with great pleasure that we announce our recent research paper, Milvus: A Purpose-built Vector Data Management System, has been accepted by the 2021 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference.

![letter.png](https://assets.zilliz.com/letter_84e9cd57cf.png)

It is with great pleasure that we announce our recent research paper, [*Milvus: A Purpose-built Vector Data Management System*](https://zilliz.com/whitepapers/milvus-a-purpose-built-vector-data-management-system), has been accepted by the [2021 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference](https://2021.sigmod.org/). The paper was recognized for its advanced work in vector data management, and its authors will be giving a keynote presentation at the SIGMOD Conference taking place from June 20-25 in Xi'an, China. Milvus was launched by Zilliz in 2019 and is currently an incubation-stage project at the LF AI & Data Foundation.

 

SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems. The annual ACM SIGMOD Conference, which began in 1975, is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. With an average acceptance rate of 17.4%, the annual ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference is highly selective.

*Milvus : A Purpose-built Vector Data Management System* has been recognized by SIGMOD's review committee for introducing an end-to-end solution for vector similarity search. Milvus offers a modern design and implementation, such as query processing over structured attributes and multiple vectors, as well as improved heterogeneous computing efficiency. 
 

"This research offers a significant system design level breakthrough for vector data management," said SIGMOD's review committee. "Milvus supports real-time search on dynamic data and diversified search requirements that apply to a variety of business scenarios. As an open-source project, Milvus outperforms most competing vector databases. The committee found this research paper both inspiring and enlightening."

“As the world's first open-source vector database system, Milvus has developed rapidly over the past two years to become one of the most active, influential, and widely used projects under LF AI & Data Foundation,” said Charles Xie, Chairperson of LF AI & Data Governing Board, and Founder of Zilliz. “Milvus’ recognition by SIGMOD validates its technology and software architecture among academia, as well as the database industry at large. As an open-source project, Milvus has been successfully deployed in applications spanning new drug discovery, biometric analysis, and much more. I look forward to the ongoing and ever-evolving progress made by the Milvus project and its community, to propel AI unstructured data processing to new heights.”

The paper is now available for [download](https://zilliz.com/whitepapers/milvus-a-purpose-built-vector-data-management-system).
 
 

**About Zilliz**

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus, the world’s most popular vector similarity search engine, to accelerate the development of next-generation data fabric. Milvus is currently an incubation-stage project at the LF AI & Data Foundation and has been deployed by over 600 global users. The platform's efficiency and reliability simplify the process of deploying AI and MLOps at scale.

 Zilliz is on a mission to make sense of unstructured data through open-source and cloud-native solutions. Our technology has broad applications spanning new drug discovery, computer vision, recommendation engines, chatbots, and much more.

small_Sigmod.jpg

thumbnail_Sigmod.jpg

Sigmod.jpg

New Zilliz Research on Vector Data Management Accepted by SIGMOD

AI-powered unstructured data processing and analysis startup Zilliz closed its latest Series B funding round with a $43 million investment led by Hillhouse Capital. 


**SHANGHAI, Nov. 13, 2020** – AI-powered unstructured data processing and analysis startup Zilliz closed its latest Series B funding round with a $43 million investment led by Hillhouse Capital. Additional investors include TBP Capital as well as continued participation from existing investors Morningside Venture Capital and Yunqi Partners. This marks the largest single Series B funding round for an open-source infrastructure software company to date.

Zilliz has raised over $53 million since its 2017 launch, and will use the latest round of funding to drive international workforce expansion, sustain and expand contributions to the open-source data science software ecosystem, advance development of enterprise-grade cloud services, and spur global adoption of AI-powered technology for unstructured data processing and analysis.

Unstructured data accounts for roughly 80% of all data, but only 1% gets analyzed due to processing complexities,” said Charles Xie, Founder and CEO of Zilliz. “Structured data, such as numerical values and text, has been efficiently handled by computers for decades. Unstructured data, things like images, videos, user behavior, chemical structures, and gene sequences, is far more ubiquitous. However, few tools are available to extract meaning from it. As digital transformation accelerates, unlocking the value of unstructured data will become progressively more essential. Our overarching goal at Zilliz is to utilize technology like heterogeneous computing and artificial intelligence to give people access to previously inaccessible insights.”

Xie continued, “Unstructured data processing and analysis has been pivotal to growing adoption of artificial intelligence worldwide, and we are committed to sustained investment in this space. We’ve found building software under the open-source model has eliminated national boundaries, brought a powerful network effect, and made analyzing unstructured data easier and more accessible for developers everywhere. Beginning late 2021, Zilliz will provide public, cloud-based unstructured data services that emphasize security, reliability, ease of use, and affordability."

Additional comments on the investment came from stakeholders at Hillhouse Capital, Morningside Venture Captial, and Yunqi Partners:

> Liming Huang, Investment Director, Technology Sector at Hillhouse Capital said, “How humans interact with each other, and our environments, is too complex to be represented by structured data. Hillhouse firmly believes leveraging embeddings similarity search to analyze massive unstructured datasets is the key to solving existing big data challenges. With Charles at the helm, Zilliz is building versatile applications that are a huge boon to the open-source data science software space and represent the future of data search.”

> Levi Liu, Partner at Morningside Venture Capital commented, “Three years ago Charles began ardently laying out his vision for meeting data processing demands in an increasingly digital future. We were compelled by the wide-array of real-world scenarios unstructured data analysis benefits, and have been repeatedly impressed by the innovation Zilliz is bringing to a variety of domains. We view this investment as the continuation of a long-term partnership.”

> Yu Chen, Managing Director at Yunqi Partners said, “Deep knowledge of database management, computer architecture, and the open-source software model make Charles an ideal fit for pioneering vector search technology. Zilliz’s product lines excel in almost every aspect including speed, scalability, and ease of use. We remain optimistic about future product developments, as well as the company’s ongoing contributions to global open-source communities.”

Zilliz was founded in 2017 and operates as a distributed team with offices in both the U.S. and China. The company specializes in the development of open-source, AI-powered unstructured data analysis software, and is the initiator and primary contributor to the vector similarity search project Milvus.

Milvus is currently an incubation-stage project at the LF AI Foundation, has been adopted by 400+ enterprise users, and has applications spanning image processing, computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, recommendation engines, search engines, new drug development, gene analysis, and more.


**Contact**

Please contact Jingyu Zhang by email at pr@zilliz.com.


medium_News-Zilliz Raises $43M in Series B Funding to Build AI-powered Unstructured Data Analytics.png

small_News-Zilliz Raises $43M in Series B Funding to Build AI-powered Unstructured Data Analytics.png

thumbnail_News-Zilliz Raises $43M in Series B Funding to Build AI-powered Unstructured Data Analytics.png

News-Zilliz Raises $43M in Series B Funding to Build AI-powered Unstructured Data Analytics.png

Zilliz Raises $43M in Series B Funding to Build AI-powered Unstructured Data Analytics

Keynote speakers addressed developing Faiss, applications of similarity search, and more. 

**BEIJING, Oct. 17, 2020**—Data science software company [Zilliz](https://zilliz.com), primary contributor to the open-source embeddings similarity search project [Milvus](https://www.milvus.io), hosted the first annual Milvus Community Conference last week in Beijing at the Wanda Vista Hotel. Over 200 people attended the event in-person, and more than 5,000 joined virtually.  

Event speakers included Matthijs Douze and Jeff Johnson, Research Scientists at Facebook AI; Charles Xie, Founder & CEO of Zilliz; and others. Presentations and Q&A sessions covered topics spanning the development of FAISS, applications of vector similarity search, solving unstructured data challenges with Milvus, and more. 

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_1.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_1_a8f449759c.jpeg)
##### *2020 Milvus Community Conference attendees.*

#### Facebook AI researchers discuss similarity search and developing Faiss 
Matthijs Douze and Jeff Johnson, researchers at [Facebook AI](https://ai.facebook.com/research/), gave a joint conference session remotely. Facebook AI is part of Facebook’s larger machine learning group and operates as a distributed team with offices across the U.S. and Europe. The group researches topics including computer vision, conversational AI, natural language processing (NLP), recommendation engines, and more.  

Douze and Johnson are currently the primary developers of [Facebook AI Similarity Search (Faiss)](https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss). Douze specializes in similarity search, embeddings, and unsupervised learning, while Johnson is an expert in low-level implementation of machine learning methods and optimizing AI algorithms for hardware efficiency. Johnson authored most of the original GPU backend for [PyTorch](https://pytorch.org), the primary neural network training library used and developed at Facebook. 

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_2.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_2_1e71905f84.jpeg)
##### *Matthijs Douze and Jeff Johnson, Research Scientists at Facebook AI.*

Although not formally a research category at Facebook AI, similarity search has become more relevant as data science shifts from analyzing structured databases to embeddings. Increasingly image, video, audio, text, and more data types are being converted into embeddings, or fixed sized vectors with around 100 to 1,000 dimensions, then analyzed using machine learning. Converting raw data into embeddings enables analysis of massive, trillion-vector scale datasets that would otherwise be virtually impossible. 

Faiss began as an internal C++ library at Facebook but has since become a primary tool for indexing vectors after it was released under an open-source license in 2017. As authors of Faiss, Douze and Johnson spoke about the tool's functionality, ideal scenarios for using the CPU and GPU versions of Faiss, how to balance tradeoffs that come with similarity search, and more. For additional information, watch the [full presentation on Faiss](https://www.slidestalk.com/Milvus/FAISS?video=) from the 2020 Milvus Community Conference. 

#### Zilliz talks building Milvus, an embeddings similarity search engine powered by Faiss

Charles Xie, Founder and CEO of Zilliz, attended the conference alongside the company’s core R&D team. Zilliz is the primary contributor to Milvus, an open-source vector similarity search engine powered by Faiss and currently an incubation-stage project at the [LF AI & Data Foundation](https://lfaidata.foundation). Xie spoke about the project’s evolution, releasing Milvus under an open-source license in 2019, and future development plans. 
![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_3.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_3_5b835caae2.jpeg)

##### *Charles Xie, Founder and CEO of Zilliz.*

Hai Jin, Director of Research and Development at Zilliz, discussed the unique functionality Milvus builds on top of Faiss. According to Jin, as a cloud-native application with support for different indexes (HNSW, Annoy, etc.), more efficient resource utilization, and other database management optimizations, Milvus is a more powerful and adaptable tool than Faiss on its own. 

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_4.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_4_767a325185.jpeg)

##### *Hai Jin, Director of Research and Development at Zilliz.*

####  Watch the 2020 Milvus Community Conference in full 

Additional speakers presented real-world applications of using Milvus to make sense of unstructured data. This included building a video recommendation engine at leading Chinese video streaming site iQIYI, creating a registered trademark search engine at Beijing-based online housing platform Beike, and more. Watch the [2020 Milvus Community Conference](https://www.slidestalk.com/w/298) in its entirety to see these sessions and learn how vector similarity search solves modern big data challenges. 


#### More pictures: 

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_5.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_5_4f7c1cefb7.jpeg)

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_6.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_6_3489cf3530.jpeg)

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_7.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_7_ab7b191290.jpeg)

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_8.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_8_6a71fbcfd0.jpeg)

![News_Facebook AI Researchers Discuss Similarity Search at 2020 Milvus Community Conference_9.jpeg](https://assets.zilliz.com/News_Facebook_AI_Researchers_Discuss_Similarity_Search_at_2020_Milvus_Community_Conference_9_3b348f0d74.jpeg)

Products

Resources

Open Source

About

News