Free Tiers in Weaviate Cloud, new Playground demos and a Ricoh investment. Hello Weaviate Community! The best developer platforms don't just provide infrastructure - they make it easy to learn, experiment, and build. That's why this week Weaviate is introducing free tiers across Weaviate Cloud, launching the new Weaviate Playground with hands-on AI demos, and celebrating a strategic investment from Ricoh as Weaviate continue expanding the AI-native platform for developers and enterprises alike. Latest AI & tech insights. Explore its recent Weaviate content: Read. * | Building AI should start with building - not billing: Weaviate has always been free to self-host. Now, Weaviate is extending that philosophy across the entire Weaviate Cloud platform with a free tier for the managed database, Query Agent, and Engram. Read the blog * | Ricoh invests in Weaviate: A new strategic investment from Ricoh through the RICOH Innovation Fund marks another exciting milestone as Weaviate continue building the AI-native database powering the next generation of AI applications. Read the announcement * | Memory changes everything for AI agents: Learn how Engram gives agents persistent memory and context, enabling them to remember past interactions, learn over time, and power more capable production-ready applications. Read the announcement * | Import & Vectorize Data at Scale: Moving from a prototype to millions of objects introduces new challenges. Learn production best practices for high-volume imports, server-side batching, retries, multimodal ingestion, and building resilient pipelines with Weaviate. Read the guide Watch. * | Knowledge Engineering with Dr. Bradley Allen - Weaviate Podcast #139: Dr. Allen explores five decades of AI history, from expert systems and knowledge graphs to today's LLMs, explaining why knowledge engineering remains essential for building trustworthy enterprise AI. Watch the full podcast * | Can Weaviate Win Europe's Biggest Hackathon?: Follow the Weaviate team as Weaviate take on one of Europe's largest AI hackathons, building an agentic content platform in just 26 hours while exploring the future of Europe's startup and builder ecosystem. Watch the journey * | Building a Production-Ready Legal RAG App... in One Prompt: See how Weaviate built a production-ready legal assistant using Weaviate Query Agent, multi-vector retrieval, and coding agents - transforming weeks of development into a single guided prompt. Watch the tutorial Product highlights. * 🆓 Weaviate Cloud Free Tiers: Weaviate Cloud now includes free tiers (with no credit card required) for both Database and Engram. Launch a fully managed cluster, experiment with Query Agent and persistent memory, and upgrade whenever you're ready. Start free * | Introducing the Weaviate Playground: Explore a growing collection of interactive demos built with Weaviate - from Engram and Query Agent to multimodal search and AI-powered recommendations. It's the easiest way to experience what's possible before building your own applications. Explore the Playground * | Engram General Availability: Its managed memory service for AI agents is now production-ready, enabling persistent context across sessions so agents can remember, learn, and improve over time. Try it now * | Weaviate Core v1.36.18: The latest patch release delivers stability improvements, bug fixes, RBAC enhancements, and infrastructure updates to keep production deployments running smoothly. Read the release notes. Ready to start building? Jump right in and spin up your free cluster with Weaviate Cloud. Or check its GitHub and star Weaviate while you're there. Hungry for more? Have a question or want to connect? Join its Weaviate Forum to engage in community conversations. See you in two weeks,

Ricoh invests in ai-native vector database startup Weaviate through the RICOH Innovation Fund. TOKYO, JAPAN - June 16, 2026 - Ricoh Company, Ltd. today announced that Ricoh has made an investment into Weaviate (Co-founder and CEO: Bob van Luijt, Co-founder and CTO: Etienne Dilocker), a developer of an AI-native vector database designed for unstructured data, headquartered in the Netherlands, through Ricoh's corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, the RICOH Innovation Fund, on March 13, 2026. This investment advances Ricoh's global strategy to support customers through digital and AI transformations, by exploring the potential of creating new solutions combining Ricoh's data capture technology with Weaviate's context-aware database. Enterprises today hold vast amounts of unstructured data - including scanned documents, PDFs, email text, and handwritten notes. While these data assets contain valuable knowledge, they are often difficult to utilize effectively with traditional data management methods, creating a key barrier to enterprise AI adoption. As generative AI adoption accelerates, transforming unstructured data AI-ready is becoming increasingly critical so that enterprises can leverage it in decision-making and business operations, ultimately improving productivity. Weaviate offers the all-round AI database, easy to use with the features and integrations developers need. Built with an open-source foundation and focused on a first-class developer experience, it is the default for developers to build AI applications. By evolving beyond traditional retrieval systems and incorporating a memory layer, Weaviate enables AI agents to retain and utilize context over time. This helps overcome the limitations of stateless processing, allowing applications to access relevant information more effectively and generate more accurate, consistent, and context-aware responses. Beyond simply organizing unstructured data, Weaviate's capabilities built on its vector database enable AI agents to learn from past interactions and access diverse enterprise information, supporting more advanced and long-term reasoning as well as improved decision-making. Through this investment, Ricoh will support Weaviate's efforts becoming the critical infrastructure for the agentic shift and explore opportunities to combine Ricoh's data capture technologies with Weaviate's context-aware database. This combination is expected to unlock the value of unstructured data that has not been fully utilized until now and lead to the creation of new solutions that enable cross-functional utilization of diverse information accumulated within the enterprise. Eiji Suzuki, General Manager, Corporate Planning Center, Corporate Planning Division, Ricoh Company, Ltd. stated, "Built on open technology and a strong community, Weaviate has pursued a data foundation that enables AI to understand and leverage information in context. Through these efforts, the company has helped shape a reliable approach to data utilization in the era of generative AI. Ricoh shares this vision. We are delighted to embark on this partnership and look forward to creating value together through our collaboration. Together, we are committed to advancing this vision further and unlocking new value for our customers. Through this partnership, we will translate the potential of generative AI into practical business applications and more informed decision-making." Bob van Luijt, Co-founder and CEO, Weaviate added, "Weaviate's open-source software is already proving its value in Japan, as the growth we're seeing in adoption and community engagement is unmistakable. We're excited to partner with Ricoh, who recognizes that momentum and shares our conviction that this ecosystem is just getting started. This funding isn't just capital; It's fuel to accelerate what the community is already building. This partnership signifies a major milestone in our global expansion strategy, specifically tailored to meet the sophisticated demands of the Japanese market. As we scale our operations, we remain committed to fostering a robust developer network and driving innovation that resonates across the entire technological landscape of the region." Ricoh established the RICOH Innovation Fund in November 2023 to support the growth of B2B startups and accelerate its transformation into a digital services company. Through open innovation and collaboration with partners, Ricoh supports people's creativity and contributes to a sustainable society by generating innovation and continuously transforming people's work.

Weaviate launches Agent Skills to empower AI coding agents. The new open-source repository delivers structured skills, slash commands, and production-ready cookbooks to reduce AI coding errors and speed up weaviate-based application development. February 21, 2026 13:22 ET | Source: Weaviate Amsterdam, Netherlands, Feb. 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - February 20, 2026 - Weaviate, the leading open-source AI database, today announced the launch of Weaviate Agent Skills, an innovative open-source repository that equips popular coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and Gemini CLI with precise tools for generating production-ready code targeting Weaviate workflows. This release builds directly on Weaviate's Query Agent, first previewed in March 2025 and reaching general availability in September 2025. The Query Agent supports natural language queries across multiple collections, featuring multi-collection routing, intelligent query expansion, decomposition for complex questions, user-defined filters, and reranking for optimal results. Developers can test Agent Skills immediately using Weaviate Cloud's free Sandbox clusters - small instances designed for experimentation that last 14 days and can be extended or upgraded to production Shared Cloud setups. Comprehensive Repository Tools The repository at github.com/weaviate/agent-skills is structured into two core sections, providing full lifecycle support from basic operations to complete applications. Weaviate Skills in the /skills/weaviate directory offer granular scripts for key tasks. These cover cluster management such as schema inspection, collection creation, and metadata retrieval; data lifecycle operations including imports from CSV, JSON, or JSONL files plus example data generation; agentic search powered by Query Agent; and advanced retrieval options like hybrid search (blending semantic and keyword with alpha parameters), pure semantic, or keyword modes. Cookbooks in the /skills/weaviate-cookbooks folder provide end-to-end blueprints for production apps. Highlights include Query Agent chatbots built with FastAPI backends and Next.js frontends; multimodal PDF RAG pipelines using ModernVBERT for multivector embeddings alongside Ollama or Qwen3-VL for generation; basic, advanced, and agentic RAG implementations with decomposition and reranking; and DSPy-optimized agents incorporating custom tools and persistent memory. Six Streamlined Slash Commands Agent Skills introduces six intuitive commands that AI coding agents can auto-discover and execute, streamlining Weaviate interactions: * /weaviate:ask: Delivers AI-generated answers with citations via Query Agent. * /weaviate:collections: Lists all schemas or inspects specific collections. * /weaviate:explore: Shows data metrics, counts, and sample objects. * /weaviate:fetch: Retrieves objects by ID or filters by properties. * /weaviate:query: Performs natural language searches across collections. * /weaviate:search: Executes hybrid, semantic, or keyword searches with parameters like alpha blending. For instance, developers can run "/weaviate:search query 'best laptops' collection 'Products' type 'hybrid' alpha '0.7'" for balanced retrieval or "/weaviate:ask What are vector database benefits?" against a Documentation collection. CEO Bob van Luijt's Vision Bob van Luijt, Co-Founder and CEO of Weaviate - which he launched as an open-source vector search engine in March 2019 - shared launch insights. "Weaviate Agent Skills bridges the gap between high-velocity AI coding and reliable infrastructure, letting developers build sophisticated AI systems without debugging agent hallucinations," van Luijt stated. As a prominent Netherlands-based technology entrepreneur, Van Luijt champions open-source AI tools. He positions Weaviate as a "batteries-included" stack that combines vector search, structured filtering, and agentic capabilities for modern AI applications. Instant Setup for Developers Integration is designed for speed. Install with a single command like npx skills add weaviate/agent-skills or via plugin managers in tools like Claude Code. Configure environment variables using your Weaviate Cloud endpoint and API key from a free Sandbox cluster. Run /weaviate:quickstart for guided setup. This launch aligns with Weaviate's 2025 momentum, including Query Agent GA, enhanced TypeScript/Python SDKs, multi-turn conversations, streaming responses, and new C#/Java clients for broader ecosystem support. Weaviate invites the community to star the repo, submit pull requests for new cookbooks, and participate in discussions on GitHub, the Weaviate Forum, Slack workspace, and X. Strategic Impact on AI Development Agent Skills addresses a critical pain point: AI agents often generate inaccurate or incomplete code for vector databases due to hallucinations or outdated knowledge. By providing verified, modular tools, Weaviate enables faster iteration from prototype to production. Early adopters report 3x reductions in debugging time for RAG pipelines and agentic apps. The repository's modular design also facilitates contributions, with plans for expanded skills covering generative modules, tenancy isolation, and hybrid cloud deployments. About Weaviate Weaviate is an open-source, AI database that handles storage, retrieval, and orchestration for generative AI at scale. Backed by enterprise-grade Weaviate Cloud services, it powers agentic workflows - from simple semantic search to complex multi-agent systems - delivering sub-second latency on billions of objects. Media Contact: Philip Vollet [email protected] +49-160-96488554