Qdrant raises €2 million to build the future of neural search and bring applied AI to the next level

Berlin, 12. January, 2022 - The Berlin-based deep-tech start-up Qdrant announces a €2 million pre-seed round of financing from two European funds: 42CAP, an industry-specialized German fund based in Munich, and IBB Ventures, an early-stage VC fund based in Berlin, joined by several business angels with a deep know-how of the industry. With the investment, Qdrant will grow the community of early adopters and going to establish its technology as a standard by releasing the major version of its open-source neural search engine in 2022. 

Founded in October 2021 by André Zayarni and Andrey Vasnetsov, Qdrant is developing the leading neural search technology to bring applied AI solutions to the next level and make metric learning practical. Its flagship product neural search engine provides a production-ready service with a convenient API to store, search, and manage vectors along with the additional payload. Qdrant engine is tailored to extended filtering support making it useful for all sorts of neural-network or semantic-based matching, recommendations, faceted search, and other applications.

Both founders have strong technical backgrounds. André Zayarni, CEO of Qdrant, started his career in 2007 after studying Computer Science in Karlsruhe at StudiVZ in Berlin, the former biggest social network in Germany which was competing with Facebook. After spending some years in Gaming at Bigpoint and as a technical and product lead at several startups, he worked the last five years as CTPO of MoBerries, an AI-driven job-matching platform. Andrey Vasnetsov, CTO of Qdrant, came to Germany two years ago from Moscow, where he used to work at Mail.ru Group, the Russian Google competitor, and later led the search department of Tinkoff Bank, the most modern and IT advanced bank in Russia.

Qdrant is a COSS (Commercial Open Source Software) business company. It means the main technology is available as open-source under an OSS license like e.g. Apache 2.0. Open source is the backbone of almost all digital technologies today. Without open-source, most of the modern tech companies wouldn't be able to operate, there are barely any modern tech products built without open source. The commercial part is built around the open core with additional enterprise-level offerings. Famous examples from the COSS ecosystem are unicorns like Elastic, MongoDB, Confluent, or Fastly.

“Metric learning and vector search are mired in academia. Each year FAANG-sponsored Ph.D. students publish yet another batch of airy-fairy papers, only suitable for IT Giants. Qdrant takes a different path. We are focusing on the engineering side to actually make Metric Learning practical.” Andrey Vasnetsov

“Our mission is to help businesses to take advantage of AI and make the most of their applied Data Science solutions, especially working with unstructured data, by using our open-source vector similarity engine. Our potential customers and early adopters are almost all businesses that use or offer AI-based solutions.”  André Zayarni

In order to accelerate the growth and adoption, Qdrant raised a seven-figure pre-seed round. The round was led by 42CAP, an industry-specialized German fund based in Munich, and IBB Ventures, an early-stage VC fund based in Berlin, both with a proven track record in supporting early-stage deep tech startups and helping them accelerate their growth.

About Qdrant

Qdrant (qdrant.tech) is based in Berlin (Germany) and was founded in October 2021 by André Zayarni and Andrey Vasnetsov. Qdrant is disrupting the traditional approach of AI-based solutions development with Deep Metric Learning and building the business around it using our unique Open Source Neural Search Engine as the innovative technical foundation.

About IBB Ventures

IBB Ventures (www.ibbventures.de) has been providing venture capital to innovative Berlin-based companies since 1997 and has established itself as the market leader in early stage financing. The funds are primarily used for development and market launch of innovative products or services as well as for business concepts from creative industries. Two funds with a total volume of EUR 122 million are currently in the investment phase. Both VC funds are financed by the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), managed by the State of Berlin. IBB Ventures has already invested in more than 260 creative and technology companies in Berlin; in syndicates with partners, the start-ups received approx. EUR 1.7 billion, of which IBB Ventures has invested EUR 250 million as lead, co-lead or co-investor.

Contact IBB Ventures:

Tobias Schimmelpfennig
IBB Ventures
Bundesallee 210
10719 Berlin

Phone: +49 (0)30 2125 3201
E-Mail: info@ibbventures.de