Pinecone delivers leading retrieval at scale with support from Microsoft for Startups

Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. Founded in 2019, Pinecone abstracts vector database complexity, allowing developers to build AI applications faster.

Partnership with Microsoft

Pinecone’s adaptive indexing architecture, built on Microsoft Azure, delivers sub-100ms semantic search latency, robust security with Microsoft Entra ID, and effortless scaling for billions of vectors. This enables customers to focus on AI-driven outcomes without operational overhead.

Pinecone’s vector database runs on a highly optimized, multi-layered architecture built for production-grade AI workloads at scale. Leveraging Microsoft Azure, this architecture enables Pinecone to deliver consistent sub-100ms query latency and high availability while managing billions of vector embeddings for customers across industries.  

At the heart of Pinecone’s infrastructure is a serverless, “slab”-based architecture that isolates data by customer while dynamically scaling to workloads with tens of billions of vectors. A built-in data freshness layer enables immediate searchability of new and updated vectors, eliminating the need for manual reindexing and accelerating development cycles.

Pinecone is also a part of Microsoft for Startups, which is designed to support high-growth B2B startups that build on Microsoft technologies. As part of this initiative, Pinecone benefits from a range of go-to-market resources that have significantly enhanced its growth trajectory. These include co-sell support from Microsoft account teams and Azure representatives, promotional opportunities through the Azure Marketplace, and collaborative marketing efforts such as joint conference participation to boost customer engagement and co-selling potential. These strategic advantages have enabled Pinecone to expand its customer reach within the Microsoft ecosystem, all while allowing its internal teams to concentrate on driving product innovation. 

Go-to-market success

For joint customers, the Pinecone-Microsoft partnership provides streamlined vendor management through consolidated Microsoft relationships, faster deployment cycles with pre-integrated Azure services, and enhanced compliance posture through Microsoft's enterprise security ecosystem. 

The partnership is positioned to drive continued innovation as well as customer acquisition. As AI adoption continues to accelerate, Pinecone is looking ahead at deeper end-to-end AI workflows, expanded regional availability aligned with Azure's global datacenter footprint, advanced security features leveraging Microsoft Entra ID, and joint solution development with Microsoft's AI and machine learning product teams.

"Our work with Microsoft exemplifies how cloud partnerships can help expand the adoption of AI technology. By combining Microsoft's reach and Azure's infrastructure capabilities with Pinecone's vector database expertise, we're enabling customers like Aquant to achieve transformational results. This isn't just about technology—it's about creating an ecosystem where AI innovation can flourish at enterprise scale," says Adel Farahmand, VP, Sales & Partnerships, Pinecone.

Customer success

For Pinecone, Microsoft for Startups has accelerated customer acquisition and reduced sales cycle complexity. Through Pinecone’s Azure Marketplace presence, Aquant leveraged an Azure Marketplace Private Offer, and the entire purchasing process was done quickly and easily through their existing Microsoft relationship.

Aquant, a domain-specific agentic AI platform for professionals servicing complex equipment, needed to scale critical internal knowledge and insights across service operations in real-time. Their previous vector search infrastructure, built on PostgreSQL extensions, couldn't meet the performance demands of production AI applications serving field technicians and customer support teams globally.

To support increasingly complex AI workloads, including agentic systems and high-throughput recommendation engines, Pinecone uses an adaptive indexing architecture based on Log-Structured Merge (LSM) trees. This allows efficient management of both small bursty workloads like per-user agent sessions and larger sustained workloads like recommender systems—all while minimizing latency and compute usage. 

The architecture also supports millions of namespaces with minimal overhead per namespace, ensuring cost-effective performance at scale. Pinecone automatically handles replication and scaling based on workload demands, optimizing for both throughput and resource efficiency without manual index tuning. Security and compliance are reinforced by integrating Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) for identity and access control. 

This streamlined infrastructure enables Pinecone to not only meet the demanding needs of enterprise AI applications but also operate efficiently at a global scale, supporting diverse customer workloads while minimizing operational overhead.

Pinecone enabled Aquant to process tens of millions of vectors across customer-specific namespaces, achieve sub-100ms semantic search latency, implement sophisticated metadata filtering, scale secure multi-tenant architecture, and eliminate infrastructure operational overhead.

Aquant achieved impressive performance improvements across several key metrics. In production benchmarks, the system reached 98% retrieval accuracy, while response times for full answers dropped significantly—from approximately 24 seconds to just 13.7 seconds. Additionally, response initiation became twice as fast, now averaging 2.89 seconds, and the number of no-response queries was reduced by 53%. These technical enhancements translated into meaningful business outcomes, including a 48% increase in weekly question volume and a 49% reduction in average time-to-resolution for service cases. Cost efficiencies followed, with a 19% decrease in cost per service case and a 62% reduction in parts replacement costs. Furthermore, onboarding new technicians became 50% faster, streamlining workforce integration and productivity. 

The collaboration between Pinecone and Microsoft combines Pinecone’s cutting-edge vector database technology with the scalability and security of Microsoft Azure, and organizations like Aquant are achieving new levels of performance, efficiency, and innovation. As AI adoption accelerates across industries, Pinecone’s commitment to simplifying complex infrastructure with the help of Microsoft Azure ensures that customers can focus on what matters most: driving transformative outcomes.