Chroma Inc.
Chroma builds memory for AI applications through an open-source embedding database that makes knowledge, facts, and skills pluggable for large language models, enabling developers to build AI applications with semantic search and retrieval capabilities.
Founding Story
Jeff and Anton were experimenting with model interpretability and needed an open-source vector database that was powerful and easy to use. They found existing products were difficult to use and built for different use cases like web-scale semantic search, so they built Chroma for themselves. After Anton finished graduate school in Germany in 2018 and moved to the US, he reached out to Y Combinator founders in computer vision and robotics, which led to a friendship and eventual partnership with Jeff. Following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, they pivoted to target developers building on top of large language models.
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Leadership
Founders
Jeff Huber
Co-founder and CEO of Chroma. Previously co-founder of Standard Cyborg (Y Combinator alum). Background in machine learning and model interpretability. Second-time entrepreneur with deep experience in model interpretability and latent spaces.
Anton Troynikov
Co-founder of Chroma. Previously computer vision software engineer at Iris Automation Inc. (2016-2017) and worked at Meta. Completed graduate school in Germany (finished 2018) before moving to the US. Deep experience in model interpretability, latent spaces, and computer vision.
Executive Team
Jeff Huber
Co-Founder and CEO
Previously co-founder of Standard Cyborg (Y Combinator alum). Background in machine learning and model interpretability. Second-time entrepreneur.
Anton Troynikov
Co-Founder
Previously computer vision software engineer at Iris Automation Inc. and worked at Meta. PhD-level education with graduate studies in Germany.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Usage-based pricing for cloud service (Chroma Cloud) with charges for data written, stored, queried, and network bandwidth. Free open-source version available. Subscription tiers (Starter, Team, Enterprise) with monthly fees and usage-based costs. Enterprise custom pricing available.
Pricing Tiers
Free plan with $5 in free credits. Usage pricing: $2.50/GiB written, $0.33/GiB/month storage, $0.0075/TiB queried, $0.09/GiB network. 10 databases, 10 team members, Community Slack support.
$100 credits included then usage pricing: $2.50/GiB written, $0.33/GiB/month storage, $0.0075/TiB queried, $0.09/GiB network. 100 databases, 30 team members, Slack support, SOC II compliance, volume discounts.
Custom pricing. Unlimited databases, unlimited team members, dedicated support, single tenant clusters, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) clusters, SLAs.
Target Markets
- AI/ML developers and engineers
- Software developers building LLM applications
- Enterprises implementing AI solutions
- Startups building on GPT-4 and other LLMs
- Data scientists
- Applied AI researchers
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications
- LLM application memory and knowledge management
- Semantic search systems
- AI-powered search and retrieval
- Long-term memory for AI applications
- Custom data retrieval for LLMs to prevent hallucinations
- Capital One
- Mintlify
- UnitedHealthcare
- Conduit
History & Milestones
Over 21,000 GitHub stars and 5 million monthly downloads
Released version 1.0.0
Launched sparse vector search capabilities
Launched Chroma Cloud public availability - fully-managed serverless offering backed by Chroma Distributed (Apache 2.0 serverless database in Rust)
Chroma Cloud entered private beta for one year
