Pinecone Appoints Chuck Fontana as VP of Business Development

Former SentinelOne, Okta, and Cisco executive joins Pinecone to capitalize on industry rush to partner with the market-leading vector database

NEW YORK, Oct. 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pinecone, the vector database company providing long-term memory for AI, today announced the appointment of Chuck Fontana as its VP of Business Development. In this newly created position, Fontana is responsible for capitalizing on the rapidly growing interest in partnering with Pinecone to deliver integrated and easy-to-use solutions for building Generative AI applications and taking these solutions to market. In this role, Fontana will manage all partner relationships including those with cloud and data platforms, LLM providers, system integrators, and other companies in the GenAI and cloud infrastructure space.

"I'm thrilled to join the Pinecone team and contribute to the incredible momentum we've already built," said Fontana. "The future of AI is deeply intertwined with vector databases. Pinecone is at the forefront of this evolution, as evidenced by the exuberance of other market-leading companies to partner with us. It's an exciting time to be part of this journey."

Fontana will play a key role in delivering on Pinecone's goal of delivering great Generative AI solutions wherever developers are building them. This includes rapidly expanding existing relationships with cloud and data platforms, as well as other leading companies in the AI ecosystem.

Previously, Fontana served as Senior VP of Business Development at SentinelOne, where he was part of the management team that took the prominent cybersecurity company public in 2021. He also served as Okta's VP of Corporate and Business Development when it went public in 2017. Prior to that, in various managerial and executive roles over the course of more than a decade at Cisco, Fontana drove efforts that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue.

"Chuck's track record and passion for business development will undoubtedly elevate our partnerships and growth even more," said Bob Wiederhold, President & COO of Pinecone. "Chuck's addition to the team will accelerate our goal of delivering great solutions for building Generative AI applications and delivering them wherever developers are building them. He will accelerate the development of increasingly strategic relationships with existing partners and enter into new partnerships with a rapidly growing number of ecosystem vendors that want to work with Pinecone. We see a major rush by companies in the GenAI and cloud infrastructure space to partner with us, because everyone wants to partner with the market leader. We are excited to have Chuck build our Business Development function to capitalize on these tremendous opportunities and ensure we equally serve our partners."

About Pinecone

Pinecone created the vector database, which acts as the long-term memory for AI models and is a core infrastructure component for AI-powered applications. The managed service lets engineers build fast and scalable applications that use embeddings from AI models, and get them into production sooner. Pinecone recently raised $100M in Series B funding at a $750M valuation. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from ICONIQ Growth and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Wing Venture Capital. Pinecone operates in San Francisco, New York, and Tel Aviv.

For more information: https://www.pinecone.io.

SOURCE Pinecone Systems Inc