Announcing Pinecone Pioneers: A Program for Builders, Organizers, and Community Leaders
AI is evolving fast—and so is the way people build and share what they know. We’ve seen developers in the Pinecone community doing a lot more than ship code. They’re writing tutorials, hosting meetups, helping others get unstuck, and creating content other developers refer to.
We want to support that work. So we’ve launched the Pinecone Pioneers program.
Pinecone Pioneers is our way of recognizing and supporting the people who push the boundaries of making AI knowledgeable —those working on agentic AI, search, personalized assistants, and everything in between. The goal is to elevate their work, open up opportunities for collaboration, and give back in meaningful ways.
This first cohort includes people from all over the world, working across startups, research, and enterprise.
- Daniel Morris – NLP engineer and solutions architect specializing in RAG systems at enterprise scale.
- Tomo Kanazawa – Creator of OneNode, an open-source multi-modal semantic search framework.
- Joseph Petty – DevRel lead at Appsmith; founder of Greenflux; former nuclear plant operator.
- Kaya Jones – CS grad and founder of Forever22, building AI tools for business workflows.
- Mark Evans – Founder of Proving Ground, helping engineers build AI-native startups.
- Kalan Peace – Bridging fashion and tech to create personalized, AI-powered experiences.
- Shubham Pawar – LLM researcher at Qloo focused on personalization and cultural AI.
- Mark Kashef – CEO of Prompt Advisers, educator, and practical AI content creator on YouTube.
You’ll be seeing more of them soon—in blog posts, on stage, and online.
Over the next weeks, we’ll be highlighting their work in:
We’re just getting started, and the program will continue to grow throughout 2025.
About the Pinecone Pioneers program
What it is
This program recognizes people who are already out there doing the work—building with Pinecone, teaching others, sharing what they’ve learned, and helping the broader AI ecosystem move forward.
It’s not a promotional campaign or a perk club. It’s a simple way to back the people who are showing up and contributing meaningfully.
What Pioneers get
🧭 Early product roadmap — Be the first to know what’s shipping and where we’re headed
📣 Amplification — We’ll help more people see what you’re doing
💬 Direct access to the team — Feedback goes both ways
🎟️ Support for talks and events — We’ll help you get there, whether that’s a conference or a meetup
🧵 Private space for Pioneers — A quieter place to share ideas
Who it’s for
We’re looking for people who are actively building and sharing. That could mean:
- Devs shipping demos, tools, or integrations
- Educators writing technical posts or tutorials
- Organizers running events or community conversations
- Engineers putting vector search into production
- Or anyone else contributing in a meaningful way
You don’t need a huge following. Just a clear point of view and a willingness to share.
How to join
If that sounds like you—or like someone you know—we’d love to hear from you.
👉 Apply here
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