Charles Xie

Charles Xie is founder and CEO of Zilliz, the company behind the Milvus open-source vector database. He founded Zilliz in 2017 and open-sourced Milvus in 2019, arguing that unstructured data needed purpose-built vector infrastructure rather than bolted-on search hacks.

Creating Milvus

Xie's team developed Milvus as an open-source vector database and contributed it into the LF AI & Data ecosystem. Interviews on the Zilliz blog describe a long bet that embeddings would become a default data type for AI apps, and that operators would need something that behaved like a real database.

Commercializing vector databases

As CEO he raised institutional capital to offer managed Zilliz Cloud alongside the open-source project. Public talks and Unite.AI interviews cast him as pushing vector databases from niche tooling into mainstream AI infrastructure.