What Ceramic does

Ceramic (Ceramic, Inc.) is a Delaware-incorporated AI infrastructure company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Founded in 2024 by Anna Patterson, the company emerged from approximately one year of stealth development and publicly launched in March 2025 with $12 million in seed funding led by NEA and strategic participation from IBM, Samsung Next, Earthshot Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.

The company operates two core product lines. The first is a Web Search API that indexes over 40 billion web pages and returns results at approximately 50ms latency for $0.05 per 1,000 queries — pricing the company positions as materially below leading competitors priced at $14 per 1,000 queries. This product is targeted at AI agent developers running high-frequency search workloads, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) implementations, AI chatbot builders, and verification/fact-checking workflows that require current web evidence. The second line is a proprietary AI model training stack achieving over 80% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) on NVIDIA B200 GPUs and supporting 96,000-word long-context training without performance degradation, marketed at approximately 2.5x the efficiency of open-source stacks and validated across NVIDIA, AWS, Coreweave, AMD, and Lambda hardware. In March 2026 the company launched Supervised Generation, a verification layer built on NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano that flags LLM outputs against retrieved web evidence with inline citations and confidence scores.

Ceramic runs a hybrid go-to-market combining product-led growth (free tier of 1,000 queries, self-serve sign-up, usage-based pricing that does not expire) with an enterprise field-sales motion offering custom rate limits, dedicated support, private data indexing, and SOC 2 Type II compliance with zero data retention. The company serves AI developers, RAG implementers, and enterprises building custom models, with named technical partners including Lambda and xAI.

Name

Ceramic

Legal name

Ceramic, Inc.

Website

https://ceramic.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2024

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Ceramic is a Mountain View-based AI infrastructure company providing a web-scale search API ($0.05 per 1,000 queries) for LLM grounding and a proprietary training stack achieving 80%+ MFU on NVIDIA GPUs, serving AI developers and enterprises building custom models.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

AI Infrastructure

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

AI Compiler, Runtime & Kernel Optimization Software (CUDA/ROCm/XLA, graph compilers) (HDAAAAAI)

akta.pro secondary industries

AI Server Systems & HGX/Accelerator Platforms (HDAAAAAB), AI Compute Virtualization & Scheduling (GPU virtualization, cluster schedulers) (HDAAAAAG)

Keywords

• AI training infrastructure
• Web search API
• Retrieval augmented generation
• Long-context training
• Enterprise AI infrastructure

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Search API Usage: Usage-based pricing for web-scale search API. Customers pay per 1,000 queries at $0.05. Supports pre-paid credit balance with auto-recharge option.
2. Training Infrastructure Services: Enterprise AI model training infrastructure with dedicated support, custom rate limits, and private data indexing capabilities. Sold via direct enterprise sales with custom pricing.
3. Subscription Plans: Monthly subscription plans with automatic renewal. Credits purchased do not expire. Enterprise features include SOC 2 Type II compliance and zero data retention.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Ceramic develops AI infrastructure software comprising a Web Search API for LLMs and a high-performance AI model training stack. The Web Search API queries 40 billion+ web pages at $0.05 per 1,000 queries with 50ms latency, enabling AI models to ground responses in current information. The Training Stack delivers 2.5x faster training and 80%+ Model FLOPs Utilization on NVIDIA GPUs with support for 96,000-word long-context training without performance degradation.

Product overview

Ceramic is an AI infrastructure company offering two core product lines: a Web Search API and a Training Stack. The Web Search API provides low-cost web-scale search ($0.05/1K queries) enabling AI models to ground responses in current information. The Training Stack delivers high-efficiency AI model training with up to 96K word long-context support and 2.5x performance gains. The Supervised Generation feature (built on NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano) adds a verification layer on top, providing real-time fact-checking with inline citations. Enterprise features include private data indexing and dedicated support.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Ceramic Web Search API Web-scale search API for AI and LLMs that provides 100x cheaper ($0.05 per 1K queries) and 10x faster search across 40+ billion web pages. It enables AI models to access current, accurate information at inference time to ground responses, supporting RAG/context grounding, agentic workflows, and verification use cases.
• Ceramic Training Stack AI model training infrastructure delivering up to 2.5x higher efficiency than open-source stacks. Supports long-context training (up to 96,000 words) without performance loss and achieves over 80% Model FLOPs Utilization on NVIDIA GPUs. Optimized for enterprises building custom AI models on NVIDIA hardware (A100, H100, H200, B200).

Quantifiable outcome

• 100x cheaper than leading alternatives ($0.05 vs $14.00 per 1,000 queries)
• +5 more outcomes

Named customers3 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability7 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

Two partnerships are on record, tiered validation partner and core.

• Lambdavalidation partnerTechnology or IntegrationLambda validated Ceramic's training infrastructure performance on NVIDIA HGX B200 GPUs. Published benchmark blog demonstrating 80%+ MFU on their hardware. Joint marketing through Lambda blog post.
• NVIDIAcoreTechnology or IntegrationMember of NVIDIA Inception program for AI startups. Ceramic's technology optimized for NVIDIA GPUs (A100, H100, H200, B200). Products demonstrated at GTC 2026.

Scale indicators8 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Broad incumbents

• Lambda: Lambda is a GPU cloud and AI infrastructure provider (NVIDIA HGX B200 partner). Both a validation partner of Ceramic and a broader incumbent offering AI training compute that competes for enterprise AI infrastructure spend.
• Anyscale: Anyscale provides a Ray-based AI compute platform for training and serving models at scale. Overlaps with Ceramic's training infrastructure offerings but serves a broader enterprise AI workload portfolio.
• Perplexity: Perplexity operates a consumer AI answer engine with proprietary search infrastructure. Comparable in the AI search domain but as a finished product rather than developer API; signals the end-market Ceramic's API serves.
• Together AI: Together AI is a broader AI cloud platform offering model training, fine-tuning, and inference infrastructure. Comparable to Ceramic's Training Stack business but with a wider portfolio including hosted models and inference APIs.

Direct peers

• Tavily: Tavily is a direct competitor offering a web search API purpose-built for AI agents and LLMs, with comparable positioning on real-time search grounding and agentic workloads. Raised $25M+ to compete head-to-head with Ceramic on AI search infrastructure.
• SerpAPI: SerpAPI provides a search engine results API used widely by AI applications for real-time web data. While broader than AI-specific, it serves overlapping LLM grounding and RAG use cases at different price points.
• Exa: Exa (formerly Metaphor) is a direct competitor providing a search API designed specifically for AI applications, with vector-based semantic search. Targets the same AI agent and LLM grounding use cases as Ceramic.
• Brave Search API: Brave Search offers an independent web search API with an emphasis on privacy and an independent index. Competitor to Ceramic's search API in the AI/LLM grounding market with established scale.
• You.com: You.com operates an AI-powered search API for developers building AI applications, with a focus on real-time web grounding. Directly competes with Ceramic's web search API offering for AI/LLM use cases.

Emerging players

• Jina AI: Jina AI provides open-source and commercial neural search infrastructure, including embedding-based search APIs for AI applications. Emerging competitor in the AI search infrastructure space with overlap on semantic/vector search for LLMs.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/ceramic_ai
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/ceramicai

Compliance2 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds2 records

Investors7 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Ceramic