MindsDB was founded in 2017 by Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan. The idea was incubated in early 2018 at Skydeck from UC Berkeley during the first funded batch, this led to the MindsDB Open Source project which started in August 2018.[5][6] On April 16, 2020, MindsDB raised $3 million. Among the investors were OpenOcean, MMC, Rogue Capital, Zyper founder Amber Atherton, SCM Advisors, YCombinator, and Berkeley SkyDeck.[7] MindsDB core was re-written from scratch during their time at Y Combinator in March 2020. In late 2020, MindsDB began offering paid premium services.
On November 1, 2021, MindsDB announced an investment from Walden Catalyst Ventures, closing the total pre-seed round to $7.6M.[8] Additionally, MindsDB announced partnerships with Snowflake, SingleStore, and DataStax (based on Apache CassandraTM) to connect its machine learning platform to these databases.[9][10]
In the same month, February 2023, MindsDB announced its integration with Hugging Face and OpenAI that would allow natural language processing and generative AI models into their database via API accessible with SQL requests. This integration enabled advanced text classification, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, translation, and more.[11][12]
During the same period, 2023, MindsDB raised a $46.5 million seed round from Benchmark, Mayfield and NVentures,[13][14] and Chetan Puttagunta joined its board of directors.[15][16]
