Zilliz vs Graphcore

Graphcore has a disclosed valuation of $600M, while Zilliz's valuation is not publicly available, making a direct size comparison difficult. Graphcore employs 500-1000 people.

Graphcore has raised more in total funding at $767M, compared to Zilliz's $113M — a gap of $654M. Combined, the two companies have completed 4 known funding rounds.

Graphcore leads with an Awaira Score of 85/100, while Zilliz sits at 65/100. That 20-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Zilliz was founded by Charles Xie in 2017. Graphcore was founded by Nigel Toon in 2016. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Zilliz: Zilliz is the commercial company behind Milvus, the most widely deployed open-source vector database, and operates Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed vector database service built on that foundation. Milvus supports billion-scale vector collections with high throughput and low-latency query performance, and is widely used in AI search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation applications.\n\nThe company raised approximately 113 million USD and has established Milvus as a standard component of the AI infrastructure stack at large technology companies and enterprises globally, with substantial adoption in China, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The open-source project has accumulated tens of thousands of GitHub stars and an active contributor community across academic and commercial organizations.\n\nZilliz occupies a strategically important position in the vector database market as the steward of the most mature open-source option in the category. Enterprise customers who start with Milvus often migrate to Zilliz Cloud for managed operations, giving the company a land-and-expand motion built on open-source adoption. This model positions Zilliz to capture a large share of the growing enterprise vector infrastructure market as AI workloads move from experimentation to mission-critical production. Graphcore: Graphcore designs the Intelligence Processing Unit, a processor architecture built specifically for machine learning workloads, offering a hardware alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model training and inference. The Bristol-based company developed the IPU around a bulk synchronous parallel computation model that distributes model parameters across thousands of processor cores with local memory, achieving high efficiency for sparse and irregular neural network computations that GPUs handle inefficiently.\n\nThe company raised approximately $700 million across six funding rounds including a Series E that valued it at approximately $2.8 billion, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Microsoft, and Samsung Ventures. Graphcore processors are deployed in research institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, as well as commercial AI platforms. The company has shipped multiple IPU generations including the MK2 IPU and Bow IPU, with the Colossus processor and IPU-POD system providing data centre scale AI compute.\n\nGraphcore competes directly against NVIDIA in the AI accelerator market, alongside AMD, Intel Gaudi, and other AI chip startups including Cerebras, SambaNova, and Groq. The AI accelerator market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2027, driven by demand for model training compute. Graphcore faces the dominant position of NVIDIA and its CUDA software ecosystem as the primary barrier to adoption, requiring significant software investment to match the maturity of CUDA tooling that researchers and engineers have relied on for over a decade.

Graphcore got there first, launching in 2016 — that's 1 year of extra runway. Zilliz didn't arrive until 2017. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Zilliz has about 100-500 employees; Graphcore has about 500-1000. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Zilliz and Graphcore compete in AI Infrastructure, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.