Marqo is an AI-native search and product-discovery platform that generates, stores, and retrieves vector embeddings behind a single API, aimed mainly at ecommerce brands in fashion, beauty, electronics, and home goods. Jesse Clark, formerly lead scientist at Amazon Robotics AI and principal scientist at Stitch Fix, and Tom Hamer, a former AWS engineer, incorporated the company in London in April 2022 before relocating the team to Melbourne, Australia.
Where most vector databases only store and query embeddings a developer has to generate elsewhere, Marqo owns the full pipeline, text and image inputs go in, ranked multimodal search results come out, so a text description can match against product photos without a separate image-embedding service. The company raised $8.1 million in seed funding in August 2023 and a $12.5 million Series A in February 2024 as it shifted its headquarters toward California.
Marqo targets ecommerce engineering teams building product search and recommendations rather than individual consumers. Pricing runs through a sales conversation rather than a published self-serve tier, with cost scaling to catalog size, traffic, and which of its Search, Recommendations, or Agentic Commerce products a customer deploys; the earlier open-source, self-hosted version of Marqo has since been deprecated.
