MongoDB Looks To Improve AI Application Accuracy With Acquisition
The data and AI platform company said today that it has acquired Voyage AI, a startup developing data search and retrieval technology that helps organizations build more trustworthy AI applications and improve the quality of AI outcomes.
Data development platform company MongoDB has acquired Voyage AI, a developer of “embedding and rerank” AI models that improve the accuracy and efficiency of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) data search and retrieval operations.
MongoDB plans to add the Voyage AI technology to its platform to help businesses and organizations build more trustworthy AI applications that deliver more accurate results with fewer hallucinations.
“AI has the promise to transform every business, but adoption is held back by the risk of hallucinations,” said Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB CEO, in a statement announcing the acquisition.
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“By bringing the power of advanced AI-powered search and retrieval to our highly flexible database, the combination of MongoDB and Voyage AI enables enterprises to easily build trustworthy AI-powered applications that drive meaningful business impact. With this acquisition, MongoDB is redefining what’s required of the database for the AI era,” Ittycheria said.
MongoDB’s developer data platform, based on its Atlas cloud database, has become a popular system for building AI-powered applications. Last May the company launched its MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP), which provides a complete technology stack, services and other resources to help partners and customers develop and deploy at scale applications with advanced generative AI capabilities.
One hurdle to broader generative AI use has been the technology’s tendency to hallucinate or make up data and deliver inaccurate results. RAG is an increasingly popular technique for allowing large language models (LLMs) to access and incorporate relevant data from external data sources, including domain-specific data or an organization’s proprietary data, and so improve AI system outputs.
Voyage AI, founded by Stanford University assistant professor Tengyu Ma in 2023 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., develops what MongoDB called “state-of-the-art” embedding and reranking models that enhance RAG data search and retrieval accuracy and improve the quality and reliability of AI application results.
“Voyage AI’s advanced embedding and reranking models enable applications to
extract meaning from highly specialized and domain-specific text and unstructured data—ranging from legal and financial documents to images, code, and enterprise knowledge bases,” according to the acquisition announcement.
“For AI applications to reach their full potential, businesses must trust their outputs, so retrieval needs to be deeply integrated with operational data to be accurate and relevant,” Ma said in the announcement.
“Joining MongoDB enables us to bring our cutting-edge AI retrieval technology to a broader audience and integrate it seamlessly into mission-critical applications. By combining our expertise in embeddings and reranking with MongoDB’s best-in-class database, we can help organizations build AI applications that deliver more accurate and reliable results at scale, empowering them to confidently apply AI to high-stakes use cases,” Ma said.
Terms of MongoDB’s acquisition of Voyage AI were not disclosed. Voyage AI raised $20 million in a Series A funding round in October 2024 led by CRV with investments from Wing VC, Conviction, Snowflake, Databricks, Pear VC, Tectonic Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Fusion Fund.
At the time of the investment Databricks also announced a partnership with Voyage AI to add its rerank and embedding models to Databricks’ Mosaic AI Model Serving, the generative AI platform developed by MosaicML, which Databricks acquired in June 2023 for $1.3 billion.
MongoDB said Voyage AI’s models will remain available through Voyage.ai, the AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace, “with further MongoDB integrations launching later this year,” according to the announcement.
