LanceDB

LanceDB was founded in 2022 in San Francisco by Chang She, a co-author of the pandas library, and Lei Xu, an Apache Hadoop committer who led ML infrastructure at Cruise. Its open-source Lance format rethinks columnar storage for multimodal AI — fast random access and scans over images, video, embeddings, and text — and had passed 20 million downloads by mid-2025, with the Rust, Python, and Java SDKs reaching 1.0.0 and a community governance structure landing in early 2026. The company raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures in June 2025 (joined by CRV, Y Combinator, Databricks Ventures, and RunwayML), bringing total funding to roughly $41M, and launched LanceDB Enterprise as a 'multimodal lakehouse' spanning search, SQL exploration, feature engineering, and training-scale data management. Generative AI leaders including Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, and Netflix run it in production, searching tens of billions of vectors and managing petabytes of training data.