Pinecone — research brief

# Pinecone — research brief

**Slug:** pinecone · **Theme:** ai-infra · **Date:** 2026-09-21 (CT)  
**Sources preference:** primary (pinecone.io pricing, product, docs) over press.

## FACT (primary)

### Company
- Pinecone Systems — managed vector database / AI knowledge platform (Database, Nexus, Marketplace, Assistant, Inference).
- Founded 2019 by Edo Liberty; based in New York; backed by a16z, ICONIQ, Menlo, Wing (company About).
- Homepage claim: **more than 10,000 customers** and **1M developers** worldwide (pinecone.io, retrieved 2026-09-21).

### Pricing ladder (pinecone.io/pricing, retrieved 2026-09-21)
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|------|-------|-------|
| Starter | Free | On-Demand DB + Inference + Assistant; AWS us-east-1; community Discord |
| Builder | **$20/mo flat** | Higher quotas; multi-project/users; Prometheus/Datadog; no usage overages |
| Standard | **$50/mo minimum** usage then PAYG | All clouds/regions; DRN; backups; RBAC; SSO; HIPAA add-on $190/mo |
| Enterprise | **$500/mo minimum** usage then PAYG | 99.95% SLA; BYOC; Private Endpoints; CMEK; audit logs; SCIM; Pro support |

### Usage meters (Standard / Enterprise database — FACT pricing page)
- Storage: **$0.33/GB/mo**
- Write units: Standard **$4–$4.50 / M**; Enterprise **$6–$6.75 / M** (by cloud/region)
- Read units: Standard **$16–$18 / M**; Enterprise **$24–$27 / M**
- Egress: **$0.10/GB** after 100 GB/mo included (Std/Ent)
- Starter allowances: up to 2 GB storage, 1M read units, 2M write units, 1 GB egress / mo

### Products
- **Database (serverless On-Demand):** dense / sparse / full-text indexes; hybrid retrieval; namespaces (up to 100k on Std/Ent).
- **Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN):** provisioned read capacity (Std+).
- **BYOC:** Pinecone in customer cloud/VPC, zero-access ops model.
- **Inference:** hosted embedding + reranking models (e.g. llama-text-embed-v2, pinecone-sparse-english-v0, rerankers).
- **Assistant:** managed RAG chat over uploaded docs (token/storage meters).
- **Nexus / KnowQL:** knowledge engine for agents (compile governed knowledge; GA per company blog 2026).
- **Marketplace:** deployable knowledge apps (company product pages).
- Cloud marketplaces: AWS, GCP, Microsoft (pricing page).

### Compliance / security (product page)
- Encryption at rest/in transit; SOC 2; GDPR/ISO 27001 on higher plans; HIPAA on Std (add-on) / Ent.
- Enterprise: Private Endpoints, CMEK, audit logs, service accounts, SCIM.

## SECONDARY (press)
- Apr 2023 Series B **$100M** at **$750M** valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz (BusinessWire / TechCrunch).
- Total funding cited ~**$138M** including prior A/seed (TechCrunch).
- Do **not** treat third-party ARR/headcount scrapers as FACT.

## INFERENCE (labeled in canvas where used)
- Teaching arc: free Starter vector/RAG land → Builder/Standard serverless PLG → Enterprise security & BYOC → Nexus/Assistant/Inference knowledge platform + CSP partnerships.
- Cost structure mirrors typical managed DB SaaS: cloud COGS (object storage + query compute), free-tier demand gen, R&D on retrieval/algorithms, PLG + enterprise GTM.

## Sources
- https://www.pinecone.io/
- https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/
- https://www.pinecone.io/product/
- https://docs.pinecone.io/guides/manage-cost/understanding-cost
- https://www.pinecone.io/product/nexus/
- https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230427005380/en/Pinecone-Raises-%24100M-in-Series-B-Funding-to-Provide-Long-Term-Memory-for-AI