Aussie AI startup Marqo raises $19.4 million and moves HQ to San Francisco

Australian startup Marqo has secured US$12.5 million ($19.4 million) in Series A funding less than six months after closing its seed funding round, as it prepares to shift its headquarters to California.

In August 2023, the previously Melbourne-based startup raised $8.1 million in seed funding, led by Blackbird, to develop its vector search engine powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Five months later, Blackbird has participated in Marqo’s Series A round, which was led by Silicon Valley investor Lightspeed. Also participating in the round was January Capital and Chronosphere founder and chief technology officer Rob Skillington.

Coinciding with the raise, Marqo plans to establish its headquarters in San Francisco, while still maintaining a presence in Melbourne and London.

Co-founder and CEO Tom Hamer will relocate to the States to support Marqo’s global expansion. He will be joining Brett Umberg, who has previously served as vice president of sales at RudderStack and is now Marqo’s head of sales.

Realising the potential of AI

Hamer founded Marqo in mid-2022 with fellow ex-Amazon employee Jesse Clark. Their goal was to develop search technology that will help users find related items using both machine learning and user engagement.

Marqo confirmed to SmartCompany its headcount has now grown to more than 20, but the startup is in a rapid hiring phase as it builds out its commercial operations in the US.

Outside of the open source community, Marqo has also attracted prominent enterprise customers, including retailers Temple & Webster and Redbubble, to use its proprietary AI-powered vector search engine.

The startup says the fresh funding will be used to advance the adoption of its search platform, which allows organisations to realise the potential value of their unstructured data. According to Gartner, unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of all enterprise data and so using that data more effectively could bring enormous benefits to companies.

“We founded Marqo because we recognised that vector search was going to be instrumental in realising the full potential of AI in our day-to-day lives, but it is far too complicated for developers and enterprises to deploy,” said Hamer in a statement provided to SmartCompany.

“We saw a need to invent a platform that not only generated superior vector embeddings but also empowered customers to build advanced search experiences within minutes, not months. This funding is validation of our approach and will help us scale up to meet the tremendous demand we’re seeing.”

“Mastering unstructured data will be the key to success in the AI race,” added co-founder Jesse Clark.

“Our platform transforms this challenge into an opportunity, creating vector embeddings that deliver intuitive and accurate search results with human-like understanding. It opens up tremendous possibilities for the future of search, smarter LLMs, and much more.”