MindsDB

MindsDB is an open-source virtual database which automates pipelines that connect real-time data to AI systems.

MindsDB adds two new building blocks to the data layer. Jobs which is a simple way to orchestrate real-time data tasks and AI Tables which connects real-time data to AI models.

History
MindsDB was founded in 2017 by Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan. On April 16, 2020, MindsDB raised $3 million. Among the investors were OpenOcean, MMC, Rogue Capital, Zyper founder Amber Atherton, SCM Advisors, YCombinator, and Berkeley SkyDeck. In late 2020, MindsDB began offering paid premium services. Forbes named it to the annual AI 50 list in 2021.

On November 1, 2021, MindsDB announced an investment from Walden Catalyst Ventures, closing the total seed round to $7.6M. Additionally, MindsDB announced partnerships with Snowflake, SingleStore, and DataStax (based on Apache CassandraTM) to connect its machine learning platform to these databases.

On January 17, 2023, MindsDB was named a 2022 Gartner Cool Vendor in its Data-Centric AI report. In February 2023, the ROSS Index ranked MindsDB the tenth overall fastest-growing open-source startup in 2022 and the third fastest-growing in the US. In the same month, February 2023, MindsDB announced its integration with Hugging Face and OpenAI that would allow natural language processing and generative AI models into their database via API accessible with SQL requests. This integration enabled advanced text classification, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, translation, and more.

During the same period, February 2023, MindsDB announced a $16.5 million investment led by Benchmark. Chetan Puttagunta joined its board of directors. It was also named one of the top most promising AI startups by CBInsights. In mid 2023 Mayfield and Nvidia Ventures joined the round extension with an investment of $30 million and a valuation of $160 million, bringing the total investment to over $55 million.

Overview
In November 2022, MindsDB announced it has more than 70 technology and data integrations with leading compute, storage, and multi-cloud databases. Additionally, the company has reached a milestone of over 15,000 stars on GitHub. MindsDB allows integration with MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Microsoft SQL Server, and Snowflake. It is compatible with BI tools like SAS, Qlik Sense, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, and Domo. MindsDB also supports Lightwood, a PyTorch-based deep learning framework.