E37: SeMI & Open-Source AI-Based Database Technology

Bob van Luijt is the Co-Founder & CEO of SeMI Technologies, the company behind the open-source project Weaviate which is a vector search engine for ML models.

Weaviate uses machine learning to vectorize (ie represent) and store data in order to more easily find answers to natural language queries.

The project has 2.5K stars on GitHub and an almost 1K person Slack community of data scientists, data engineers, and software engineers.

The company has raised over $17M from investors including NEA, Zetta, and Cortical Ventures.