Leveraged by the world’s leading tech, retail, and financial services companies, its search platform Vespa is positioned to fuel continued growth among Fortune 500 & enterprise clients.
November 1, 2023
Trondheim, Norway—Today Vespa.ai, an AI pioneer providing advanced capabilities and infrastructure for applications to leverage AI and data online at scale, announced it has raised USD $31 million in Series A funding from London-based Blossom Capital to further develop its search platform Vespa and Vespa Cloud service.
Vespa.ai, which spun out of Yahoo as a standalone company last month after many years of driving AI innovation for the internet giant, helps clients—including Spotify, Yahoo, and Fortune 500 companies—apply AI to store, sift through, and apply unlimited quantities of data to surface actionable intelligence and insights to meet their users’ needs in real time.
“As companies around the world race to adopt and adapt to AI, they face significant technical and financial burdens. Vespa’s unprecedented capabilities and functionalities, built on two decades of use and development, allow organizations of all sizes to realize their AI ambitions at scale while dramatically limiting cost and processing times and improving user experience,” said Jon Bratseth, CEO of Vespa.ai. “The investment from Blossom will allow us to further increase functionality and provide our end-to-end services to a larger number of enterprise clients.”
Vespa's vast functionality includes scanning billions of documents for global financial institutions to streamline client services or ensure compliance, enhancing ad relevance at checkout for leading online retailers to drive up check average, and providing global social media platforms with better content suggestions to keep users engaged. Its open-source nature further underscores its appeal, with more than ten million downloads on Docker Hub, making it a trusted choice for enterprises globally.
Vespa offers an integrated approach for applying AI to data during serving time, using vectors, tensors, text, structured data or any combination to provide high-quality solutions catered to diverse use cases, from search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to recommendation and ad targeting. Vespa takes responsibility for the needs of applications from end to end, including managing the data and performing model inferences directly where it resides, allowing applications developed on Vespa to scale to any amount of data, load or complexity.
“Enterprise AI has a scaling problem, and Vespa’s cutting-edge technology is a big part of the solution,” said Ophelia Brown, Founder of Blossom Capital. “Vespa has been battle-tested by leading Fortune 500 companies in media, finance, search, advertising, and e-commerce. It’s light-years ahead of anything else on the market, and Blossom is thrilled to help them take things to the next level.”
Vespa also solves the operational challenges that emerge as AI applications, particularly language apps, increase the number of customers and amount of data needed to function at scale. Vespa solves this problem by providing the capacity and functionality to scale any amount of data, load, or complexity and provide top-tier search results with sophisticated scoring and relevance.
Vespa.ai provides an AI-based search platform that allows applications leveraging AI and data online to store, search, and apply unlimited quantities of data to meet their users’ needs in real time. Vespa originated in 2001 as part of AllTheWeb, a Norwegian search engine acquired by Yahoo in 2003. Following the move to Yahoo, it set out to create a platform to solve all use cases applying AI to data online at scale. During the past 20 years, Vespa has continued to evolve to support external users and provide a cloud service. It was released as open source in 2017 and spun off into a standalone company in 2023. Thousands of companies use Vespa.ai’s open-source platform, with more than 10 million downloads on Docker Hub.
Blossom Capital is Europe’s largest dedicated Series A fund, renowned for its high-conviction strategy and relentless belief and commitment to the region’s most visionary founders. It leverages local roots with global connections to deliver an undeniable advantage for founders across consumer internet, cybersecurity, developer tools and open source, enterprise SaaS, and marketplaces. Its investments include Checkout.com, Pigment, and Tines. Find out more at www.blossomcap.com.