Vector search startup Marqo has raised $5.2 million in seed funding from Blackbird Ventures. "There's a huge opportunity to improve search," Tom Hamer, Marqo's cofounder and CEO said. Marqo, a startup that helps e-commerce businesses and marketplaces improve their search functionality, has raised $5.2 million. Its vector search uses machine learning (ML) and AI to capture the meaning and context of data such as text and images, transforming it into a numeric representation that can then be queried by users through an API. While vector search models have been around for a while, improved AI technology has made the sector more accessible.

---

Persons: Tom Hamer, Marqo's, Marqo, Hamer, Cohere's, Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez Organizations: Blackbird Ventures, Amazon, Fund Locations: London, Melbourne, Canadian