Qdrant, founded in 2021, builds an open-source vector database used to store and search the embeddings that power semantic search, recommendation systems, and the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines behind most modern AI agents and chatbots.
The open-source core can be self-hosted for free, while Qdrant Cloud adds a managed version with a free tier and usage-based paid plans, a model that helped the company raise a $50 million Series B in March 2026 as demand for agent-ready retrieval infrastructure accelerated.
For a developer building a RAG pipeline or an AI agent that needs to search embeddings at scale, whether self-hosted for full control or managed for speed of setup, Qdrant's open-source-plus-cloud model addresses that directly.
