Weaviate

Open-Source Vector Database — AI-Native Search, RAG, and Hybrid Retrieval

The consensus on Weaviate: Choose Weaviate if you want to build foundational AI infrastructure with a world-class open-source community and genuine ownership — but expect startup ambiguity and fewer large-company resources.

2019
Founded
Amsterdam
Headquarters
~110
Employees
$200M
Valuation
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Culture Overview

What it's really like to work at Weaviate

Founded in 2019 by Bob van Luijt (CEO) and Etienne Dilocker (CTO) in Amsterdam, Weaviate is an open-source AI-native vector database with 14,000+ GitHub stars and 2,000+ companies in production. The culture is remote-first, async-driven, and deeply collaborative. Engineers have broad ownership and work on foundational infrastructure powering the AI application stack.

Open SourceRemote-FirstEng-DrivenTransparentLearning
Glassdoor Ratings

Weaviate Glassdoor Ratings & Employee Reviews

4.3
Overall Glassdoor Score
Based on 31 reviews
Culture & Values4.5
Compensation & Benefits4.2
Work-Life Balance4.2
Career Opportunities4.1
Senior Management4.2
Overall Rating4.3
82% Recommend to a Friend
80% CEO Approval (Bob van Luijt)
Employee Review Themes

Working at Weaviate: Pros & Cons

✓ What employees love

  • ✓Sharp, humble, collaborative colleagues with zero-ego culture and accessible leadership
  • ✓Remote-first done well — async communication, time-zone respect, and genuine flexibility
  • ✓High autonomy and ownership — engineers own meaningful surface areas, not just tickets
  • ✓Exciting frontier product — foundational AI infrastructure directly relevant to the LLM wave
  • ✓Open-source community with 14,000+ GitHub stars and strong developer love

✗ What could be better

  • ✗Fast pace and ambiguity — structure and processes are still being built
  • ✗Small company constraints — fewer resources and benefits compared to large tech
  • ✗Priorities shift — role expectations can be unclear during growth phases
  • ✗Competitive vector DB market creates uncertainty about long-term positioning
Engineering Culture

How the engineering team works

Tech Stack

GoPythonGraphQLgRPCHNSW

Open Source

Core database is fully open-source (github.com/weaviate/weaviate) with 14,000+ stars. Client SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go, and Java. View on GitHub →

Key Features

Hybrid SearchMulti-TenancyRAGCloud Services

Team Structure

Fully remote-first, distributed across Europe, US, Canada, and Asia-Pacific. Small, ~110 person team with async-first communication and documented playbook culture.

Open Positions

Join the Weaviate team

... open positions.

Community Sentiment

What the community says about Weaviate

Mostly Positive 5 mentions from Hacker News & Reddit · Updated 2026-04-10
“Author here. June 16th, 2025, 3 AM - my mother-in-law got diagnosed with cancer. I'd been building AI agents that shared business intelligence. That night I realized: the same architecture could route survival patterns between patients.”
Hacker News chris_trevethan · 2026-03-09 View thread →
“Author here. I've been using PostgreSQL for AI workloads in production for the past 3 years and wrote this book because I kept seeing teams spin up Pinecone, Weaviate, or Chroma when pgvector could handle their use case with less operational overhead.”
Hacker News zeybek · 2026-03-05 View thread →
“I built Wax because every RAG solution required either Pinecone/Weaviate in the cloud or ChromaDB/Qdrant running locally. I wanted the SQLite of RAG -- import a library, open a file, query. Except for multimodal content at GPU speed.”
Hacker News ckarani · 2026-02-17 View thread →
“Thanks for the kind words and for giving Mantic.sh a spin, excited to hear how it works for your personal assistant!The cost estimates were rough illustrations for high-usage cloud setups (100 devs × 100 searches/day = ~3.65M queries/year):Vector embeddings: ~$0.”
Hacker News marcoaapfortes · 2026-01-06 View thread →

Sentiment data refreshed daily from public Hacker News and Reddit discussions. See all company profiles →

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