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Pinecone Nexus runs in your own cloud account. This quickstart deploys Nexus with bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC), turns a set of your documents into a context, and queries it for grounded, cited answers. See the overview for what you can do with Nexus. Nexus organizes knowledge in a hierarchy:
  • A workspace holds one or more contexts.
  • A context is built from the documents you ingest into it.
  • A query can read one or more contexts, so several contexts together can give an agent its knowledge.
See key concepts for the full model.
The examples in this quickstart use a company knowledge base of internal policies for illustration. You bring your own documents, and any set works.

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Prerequisites

  • A Pinecone Enterprise plan (required for BYOC).
  • A dedicated cloud account (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with admin access, plus the install tooling. See the deploy prerequisites for the full list.
  • Documents to build your context from, such as files to upload or a Hugging Face, GitHub, Box, or Google Drive source.

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1. Deploy Nexus

Nexus runs in your own cloud, so deploying it comes first.
1

Install Nexus

Follow Deploy Nexus BYOC to install Nexus in your own cloud account with the Pulumi installer.
2

Open your deployment's console

When the install finishes, it prints your workspace console URL. Open it to reach your deployment’s console, where the rest of this quickstart happens.

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2. Add a context

Build a context from your own documents. A company knowledge base might include a refund policy, an expense policy, and a vendor-approval matrix. Nexus ingests dense documents like PDFs directly, alongside Markdown and plain text. For example, two PDFs and a Markdown file could read:
  • policies/refunds.md: Refund requests must be submitted within 30 days of purchase. After that window, customers receive store credit, not a direct refund.
  • policies/expenses.pdf: Standard expenses over $1,000 require manager approval before reimbursement.
  • policies/vendors.pdf: Vendor invoices over $10,000 require finance approval. Invoices over $25,000 also require VP sign-off.
The queries later in this quickstart draw on these files.
1

Create a context

In your deployment’s console sidebar, next to Contexts, click + New. On the New context tab, enter a Name (for example, Company knowledge base) and a Description, then click Create context. The URL slug is generated from the name.
2

Import sources

On the Sources tab, click + Import, then bring in your documents one of these ways:
  • Upload files or an archive.
  • Pull from a public Hugging Face or GitHub repository URL.
  • Connect a Box or Google Drive account and import from it.
3

Design the manifest

On the Design tab, pick a manifest template that fits your sources (for example, General knowledge base). The template describes the artifacts and edges it’ll build and shows an estimated cost and time.
4

Curate

On the Design tab, click Save and curate. Nexus curates your sources. It chunks them, distills them into the typed artifacts the manifest defines, then indexes everything.You can follow the task under Activity. When it finishes, it reports the context is ready, with View artifacts and Query this context.
Have a .context.zip pack? In the New context dialog, open the Restore tab, drop the pack (or click choose a file), then click Restore context. Packs come from a context’s Packs tab.

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3. Query your context

Once curation finishes, ask your context a question and get back a grounded answer with citations.
1

Open the Query tab

Open your context’s Query tab, and optionally pick the answering model.
2

Ask a question

Type your question in the Search this context box and run it.

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A grounded, cited answer

Nexus plans its own retrieval across the context’s curated knowledge, gathers the relevant evidence, and composes a single grounded answer with inline citations. Asking the company knowledge base “What is the refund policy?” returns something like:
Refund requests must be submitted within 30 days of purchase. After that window, customers can still get store credit, but not a direct refund. [1] [1] policies/refunds.md
The answer is grounded in your sources, and every claim cites the document it came from, so you can check it. To see how Nexus produced it, open the query’s trace. Nexus also suggests follow-up topics and saves the query as a session you can reopen from Sessions.

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A multi-document answer

Questions that span multiple documents work the same way. Asking “Which purchases need approval, and what is the threshold for each?” returns something like:
  • Standard expenses over $1,000 need manager approval. [1]
  • Vendor invoices over $10,000 need finance approval. [2]
  • Vendor invoices over $25,000 need VP and finance approval. [2]
[1] policies/expenses.pdf [2] policies/vendors.pdf
To answer this, Nexus queried the structured tables it compiled from your policies during curation, so it enumerates every matching rule across documents, each with its own citation. A plain RAG search returns only the passages closest to your question, so it can miss rules in other documents. Answering completely across your whole corpus is a core reason to reach for Nexus over RAG. See how queries work for what the runtime does on each turn, or the overview for how Nexus compares to RAG.
To query several contexts at once, start a session from Sessions with + New session, click each context in the Query across row, and ask.

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Query from your own code

Agents send a KnowQL query over HTTP, passing the context slug as scope, and get back the same answer plus citations to act on:
curl
Output
The full response also carries citations and usage. See Authentication to set NEXUS_BASE_URL and NEXUS_TOKEN, or the Nexus API for the full surface. You can also connect an MCP server for Claude Desktop and other MCP clients.