I'm thrilled to share that Ash Ashutosh is joining Pinecone as our new CEO! Ash is an accomplished entrepreneur and tech veteran. He will grow the company and expand Pinecone’s leadership in the vector database space. I will become the company’s Chief Scientist and drive forward our mission: to make AI knowledgeable.

Ash is a three-time founder of storage and data infrastructure companies Serano Systems, AppIQ, and Actifio, leading those to hundreds of millions in annual revenues and eventual acquisitions. His 40-year journey in technology also includes time spent as the CTO of HP’s storage division, a partner at VC firm Greylock, and most recently, Global Director of Solution Sales at Google. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science from Penn State University.

It was not easy to find a leader like Ash who fits our culture, deeply understands cloud infrastructure, and has the operational track record of successfully growing companies. Over the last several months, I spent many hours with Ash talking about technology, strategy, our market and vision, and what kind of company we want Pinecone to be. I could not have hoped for a better person than Ash to partner with me on growing Pinecone.

As for myself, I’ll focus my energy on the critical and urgent effort to unlock the next phase of our technology, pushing the boundary of knowledgeable AI and search, and building delightful and context-aware products and infrastructure.

We are at a pivotal moment. The convergence of AI and data represents the defining technology transition of our lifetime. The potential value for our customers is limitless, both through leveraging AI models to revolutionize search, and by using search to enrich the context for AI. This powerful intersection is precisely where Pinecone thrives. This is where I will dig deep as Chief Scientist.

On a personal note, for those who know me, you can guess how excited I am to be spending more time with data and models, coding and prototyping, and understanding the tooling and ecosystem better. To the Pinecone team, my 46th birthday was this weekend. My 7yo daughter gave me the best birthday wish ever: “Dad, I hope you have a fun year at Pinecone and work with nice and helpful people.” She nailed it. Thank you all for being “nice and helpful.” Building Pinecone with you is a ton of fun, you rock!

I want to take the opportunity to also thank our loyal customers and users. Thank you for loving our product and trusting us with your production workloads. There is sooo much more coming! I can’t wait to spend more time with you, learn from you, and build for you.

Let’s go, Edo