Melbourne startup Marqo closes Series A funding at $19.4m
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The news: Vector search startup Marqo has closed a USD12.5 million ($19.4 million) Series A funding round. The raise was led by US venture capital firm Lightspeed, with participation from Blackbird VC, January Capital and Chronosphere founder and chief technology officer Rob Skillington.
The numbers: The Melbourne-based company, which will relocate its headquarters to San Francisco following the raise, said the new round of funding brings total financing to USD17.8 million. Australian VC Blackbird supported the raise six months after backing Marqo's USD5.2 million seed round.
The context: Marqo is a vector search platform that uses machine learning capabilities to return AI-powered relevant search results in real time. Founded by Amazon alumni Tom Hamer and Jesse Clark, the startup currently has a presence in Melbourne, London and San Francisco, and counts Redbubble and Temple & Webster as customers.
The company said the new funding will be used to advance the adoption of its search platform, unlocking the value of unstructured data across applications like end-user search and retrieval-augmented generation.
What they said: Marqo's CEO Hamer, who will move to San Francisco to head up the US expansion, said: “We founded Marqo because we recognised that vector search was going to be instrumental in realising the full potential of AI in our day-to-day lives, but it is far too complicated for developers and enterprises to deploy".
“We saw a need to invent a platform that not only generated superior vector embeddings but also empowered customers to build advanced search experiences within minutes, not months. This funding is validation of our approach and will help us scale up to meet the tremendous demand we’re seeing," Hamer said.
The source: Marqo media release
