André Zayarni

André Zayarni is co-founder and chief executive of Qdrant, a Berlin, Germany, company that makes an open-source vector database written in Rust. He founded it in May 2021 with chief technology officer Andrey Vasnetsov.

Five Years Building MoBerries

Before Qdrant he spent five years at MoBerries, an HR matching platform, which he described in a farewell post as a journey "from MVP to a working service, from engineering to product development." He left, he wrote, "to start a new venture and build technology innovation at Qdrant together with Andrey Vasnetsov."

A Side Project in Rust

"We were looking into neural search, specifically vector similarity search, while building an HR product for our previous employer," Zayarni told Future of Computing in 2022. Libraries such as FAISS did not meet their needs, so Vasnetsov wrote a vector search engine from scratch and the first version went on GitHub, according to Qdrant. "We started Qdrant as a personal project as we were passionate about open-source software and using Rust as a programming language," Zayarni said.

One early growth tactic was messaging startups from a list of more than 250 German AI companies, and many others got in touch without being contacted.

Keeping the Core Engine Free

After a $28 million Series A led by Spark Capital in 2024, Zayarni said Qdrant would not split its product. "We don't have any commercial features in the core of the engine and don't intend to have any," he told Future of Computing; the company instead sells a fully managed cloud.

In the same interview he answered developers who wonder why there is yet another vector database: "not everything that looks like a vector database performs like a vector database."

At the time of that 2024 interview, Qdrant had about 40 people and sales were founder-led. "Our market is a vector search for AI," he told CB Insights in 2026, and Qdrant now reports more than 250 million downloads and over 100 employees.