Today we’re announcing that we’re spinning Vespa.ai out of Yahoo as a separate company: Vespa.ai. Vespa began as a project to solve Yahoo’s use cases in search, recommendation, and ad serving. Since we open-sourced it in 2017, it has grown to become the platform of choice for applying AI to big data sets at serving time.

Those working with large language models such as ChatGPT and vector databases turn to Vespa when they realize that creating quality solutions that scale involves much more than just looking up vectors. Enterprises with experience with search or recommender systems come to Vespa for the AI-first approach and unrivaled operability at scale.

Even with the support built into the Vespa platform, running highly available stateful systems in production with excellence is challenging. We’ve seen this play out in Yahoo, which is running about 150 Vespa applications. To address the scalability needs, we created a centralized cloud service to host these systems, and in doing so, we freed up the time of up to 200 full-time employees and reduced the number of machines used by 90% while greatly improving quality, stability, and security.

Our cloud service is already available at cloud.vespa.ai, helping people with everything from running quick Vespa experiments, to serving business-critical applications. In total we serve over 800.000 queries per second.

While we’re separating Vespa from Yahoo, we’re not ending our relationship. Yahoo will own a
stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. Vespa will continue to serve Yahoo’s personalized content, search and run new use cases leveraging large language models to provide new personalized experiences, something that can only be done at scale with Vespa.

Creating a company around Vespa will enable us to bring these advantages to the rest of the world on a massive scale, allowing us to bring the efficiencies of our cloud service to enterprises already relying on Vespa, as well as help more companies solve problems involving AI and big data online. It will also let us accelerate development of new features to empower Vespa users to create even better solutions, faster and at lower cost, whether deploying on our cloud service or sticking with the open-source distribution. For, while Vespa offers features and scalability far beyond any comparable technology thanks to our decades-long focus on combining AI and big data online, there is so much more to do. As the world is starting to leverage modern AI to solve real business problems online, the need for a platform that provides a solid foundation for these solutions has never been stronger. As engineers, we admit this is the part that excites us the most.

We look forward to empowering all of you to create online AI applications ever better and faster, and we hope you do too!