Vectara
by Vectara
Enterprise RAG and agent platform with built-in hallucination scoring for regulated industries
Vectara is an enterprise retrieval-augmented generation and agent platform that grounds answers in a company's own documents and scores each response for hallucination. It is for regulated and compliance-sensitive enterprises that need auditable AI assistants and agents deployed as SaaS, in their VPC, on-premises or air-gapped.
Vectara is a Palo Alto company co-founded by Amr Awadallah that sells an enterprise platform for governed, grounded AI agents built on retrieval-augmented generation. The stack covers multimodal ingestion and parsing with metadata auto-tagging, hybrid keyword and semantic retrieval with its Slingshot reranker, grounded generation through its RAG-tuned Mockingbird model or a customer's choice of Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, Nemotron or Gemma, and an agent harness with skills, tools, MCP, memory and sub-agent workflows. Its signature component is the Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM), which returns a factual-consistency score with each answer. An open variant, HHEM-2.1-Open, is published for download, and the commercial HHEM-2.3 powers Vectara's public hallucination leaderboard on GitHub, which ranked 108 models as of a September 2026 update and is widely cited in model comparisons. Guardian Agents add always-on policy and governance controls. Connectors cover SharePoint, Box, Google Drive, wikis, tickets, repos and email, and interfaces include a REST API, MCP and A2A. Vectara deploys as managed SaaS, in a customer VPC on AWS, Azure or GCP, on-premises or air-gapped, with SSO, audit logs and access controls in every option, and it lists SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance. Named customers include Broadcom, which standardised on it as its agentic AI platform, plus Compass, Aon and SanDisk. Pricing starts at $100,000 a year for SaaS after a 30-day trial. Vectara raised a $25M Series A in July 2024 led by FPV Ventures and Race Capital, for $53.5M in total, and was named in five Gartner Hype Cycles in 2026.
CIOs and heads of AI in regulated industries who must prove that assistant and agent answers are grounded in approved sources.
A per-answer hallucination score and audit trail that makes grounded AI answers defensible to compliance and risk teams.
At a Glance
- Category
- Enterprise Search & Knowledge
- Pricing
- Subscription, Contact for pricing
- Target Market
- CIOs, CTOs, Heads of AI, Enterprise Developers
- Deployment
- Cloud-first, Self-hosted, Hybrid, API-based
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, USA
Key Features
- ✓Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM)
Returns a factual-consistency score with each answer, giving reviewers a measurable signal of whether a response is grounded in sources.
- ✓Hybrid retrieval and reranking
Combines keyword and semantic search with the Slingshot reranker, handling both natural-language questions and exact terms like part numbers.
- ✓Mockingbird grounded generation
A RAG-tuned generative model built to cite retrieved sources and produce structured output, with bring-your-own-model options for Claude, GPT and Gemini.
- ✓Agent harness with MCP and A2A
Builds agents with skills, tools, memory and sub-agent workflows, exposed over REST, MCP and agent-to-agent protocols for interoperability.
- ✓Guardian Agents
Applies always-on governance and real-time policy enforcement to agent behaviour, aimed at compliance teams that must control AI output.
- ✓Flexible secure deployment
Runs as SaaS, in a VPC on AWS, Azure or GCP, on-premises or air-gapped, with SSO, audit and access controls included everywhere.
Capabilities
Use Cases
- •Support deflection with grounded answers
A support team deploys an assistant over product documentation; Vectara reports deflection rising from 33% to 95% at one unnamed customer.
- •Engineering knowledge agent
A semiconductor company like Broadcom gives engineers an agent over repos, tickets and wikis, with answers grounded in internal sources.
- •Compliance-reviewed AI answers
A financial services firm logs each answer with its HHEM score so risk teams can audit and flag low-confidence responses.
- •Air-gapped government assistant
A public-sector agency runs retrieval and generation entirely on-premises or air-gapped to keep sensitive documents inside its own network.
Ideal For
Best For
- ✓Customer support and technical documentation assistants where wrong answers carry liability
- ✓Regulated industries such as healthcare, legal, financial services and government
- ✓Organisations that need RAG deployed in their own VPC, on-premises or air-gapped
- ✓Engineering knowledge agents over repos, tickets and wikis in semiconductor and manufacturing firms
- ✓Teams that want hallucination scoring built into every query rather than bolted on
Not Ideal For
- ✗Startups, prototypes and small internal tools; the $100K/year SaaS floor and removal of free and growth tiers put it out of reach
- ✗Light users, because pricing is set by deployment type rather than usage, so low volume pays the same minimum
- ✗Teams wanting a self-serve developer RAG pipeline at low cost, where LlamaCloud or Ragie are cheaper starting points
Deployment
Market Analysis
Pros
- ✓Per-answer hallucination scoring with a model buyers can download and test independently
- ✓Deploys anywhere from SaaS to air-gapped, which suits strict data-residency needs
- ✓Model-agnostic generation with major frontier and open models plus its own RAG-tuned model
- ✓Named enterprise adoption, including Broadcom standardising on the platform
Cons
- ✗High entry price ($100K/year SaaS minimum) and no free or growth tier since 2026
- ✗Pricing tied to deployment type rather than usage penalises low-volume deployments
- ✗Hacker News users testing its demo search found it smarter but slower than Algolia, with missing filter controls and misses on exact terms
- ✗Its hallucination leaderboard measures summarisation consistency and does not cover tool calling, so it says little about agent reliability
Pricing
30-day trial
$0
- ✓All features for 30 days
- ✓Console signup
SaaS
From $100,000/yr
- ✓One SaaS deployment
- ✓Fully managed
VPC
From $250,000/yr
- ✓One deployment in any VPC
- ✓AWS, Azure or GCP
On-prem
From $500,000/yr
- ✓One on-premises deployment
- ✓Air-gapped option
List prices are published as annual floors by deployment type: from $100K SaaS, $250K VPC and $500K on-premises, with exact quotes through sales. Forward-deployed AI engineers and Platinum Support are unpriced add-ons. The free and growth tiers were removed in 2026, leaving only a 30-day trial.
Security & Compliance
Connect
Sources
This page was written from 7 sources, 4 on domains other than vectara.com.
- 1.vectara.com — vectara.comvendor
- 2.vectara.com — pricingvendor
- 3.vectara.com — vectara recognized across five gartnerr hype cyclestm for 20vendor
- 4.theaiinsider.tech — vectara secures 25m series a funding to advance the trustwor
- 5.guptadeepak.com — top 5 rag as a service platforms 2026
- 6.github.com — hallucination leaderboard
- 7.hn.algolia.com — search
Stay Ahead of the Curve
Weekly enterprise AI insights for technology leaders. No spam, no vendor pitches—unsubscribe anytime.
SubscribeRelated Products
Contextual AI
Enterprise RAG and Agent Composer platform for grounded AI agents on technical documentation
Quill
Production AI agents on the SQL database you already run — no migration, no assembled stack
Twin1 AI
A permission-aware AI twin for every professional, networked so expertise moves across the firm
DeepJudge
Institutional-knowledge search and AI workflows for law firms, with no data migration