Zilliz vs Nebius

Nebius has a disclosed valuation of $25B, while Zilliz's valuation is not publicly available, making a direct size comparison difficult. Nebius employs 1,000 people.

Nebius has raised more in total funding at $2B, compared to Zilliz's $113M — a gap of $1.9B. Combined, the two companies have completed 2 known funding rounds.

Nebius leads with an Awaira Score of 84/100, while Zilliz sits at 65/100. That 19-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Zilliz was founded by Charles Xie in 2017. Nebius's founder information is not currently available in our database.

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. Nebius: Nebius is a Dutch AI infrastructure company that provides full-stack AI cloud computing services, from GPU clusters to managed machine learning platforms. Originally spun out of Yandex, Nebius has established itself as a major AI infrastructure provider with strategic partnerships including a $2 billion investment from NVIDIA and a $27 billion infrastructure deal with Meta covering dedicated GPU capacity and compute resources over a five-year period. The company operates AI-optimized data centers and offers cloud services that span the entire AI stack — from bare-metal GPU access through high-level managed AI services. Nebius competes in the rapidly growing AI cloud market alongside CoreWeave, Lambda, and the major hyperscalers, differentiating through deep engineering expertise across hardware and software layers.

Zilliz got there first, launching in 2017 — that's 6 years of extra runway. Nebius didn't arrive until 2023. 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; Nebius has about 1,000. 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 Nebius compete in AI Infrastructure, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.