Charles Xie

Charles Xie is founder and CEO of Zilliz, the company behind the open-source vector database Milvus. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to Unite.AI.

Six Years on Oracle's Database Team

Xie spent six years as a software engineer at Oracle, where he was a founding member of the Oracle 12c Multitenant Database team. There he noticed that structured data was well managed while unstructured data, which he puts at 90% of all data, went largely untapped. In 2017 he founded Zilliz around turning that data into vector embeddings.

Pitching 5Y Capital for Three Hours

Few investors understood why the world needed another database, he told 5Y Capital; the best he heard was "Interesting idea." In November 2017 he met partners from 5Y Capital at a meetup in Shenzhen, China, and what should have been a 60-minute session ran close to three hours. A week later he had a term sheet for the Series A. Milvus followed in 2019.