Exa Labs Inc., a San Francisco-based startup focused on building a specialized search engine for artificial intelligence (AI) models, has recently raised $85 million in a Series B funding round led by Benchmark Capital.
Founded in 2021 by Will Bryk and Jeff Wang, the company launched its first AI search engine in November 2022, just two weeks before ChatGPT’s loud debut.
Exa started with a vision to reinvent search. In what the startup called “stage one,” they built “a state-of-the-art search engine from scratch that is both the fastest and highest quality for AI applications.”
While traditional search engines like Google have been built to satisfy human curiosity through clicks and surging behavior, AI search engines, according to Exa, require something different – fast, structured, comprehensive, and privacy-focused access to web data that can be used for training, reasoning and real-time information retrieval.
Exa’s core innovation is its search infrastructure which is not the typical web and SEO indexing that favors neural models trained on web link data. Rather than predicting the next word in a text sequence, Exa’s models predict the most probable next link, enhancing the precision and semantic relevance of search results specifically tailored for AI workflows.
According to the company, Exa AI is the only search engine specifically designed and tailored for AI use that provides fast and high-quality knowledge, as well offering Enterprises search APIs with a Zero Data Retention (ZDR).
As a result, thousands of customers across various sectors use its services, including AI tools developers like Cursor, productivity platforms such as Notion AI, and major private equity and consulting firms.
Now in its “stage two,” courtesy of this funding round, the company says their goal “isn’t just to build [a] better search than anything before.” Instead, they affirm that they are aiming for “perfect search.”
“We dream of a world where all information is fully organized,” Bryk wrote in a blog post.
To achieve this, the startup will be aggressively scaling its indexing infrastructure to gather and encompass much more of the world’s information, expanding its GPU clusters fivefold for accelerated research and training, and growing its team to “to build, sell, and lead Exa into our next stage.”
The $85 million funding round was led by Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, an infamous Venture Capitalist. Fenton will, by the virtue of leading this round, join Exa’s board as the startup gears up for rapid expansion. “Peter’s a legendary investor who’s taken 7 companies to IPO and who passionately shares our vision,” Bryk said.
The funding round also had participation from key investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, and Y Combinator. The broad-based support from these investors highlight the intersection of deep AI and infrastructure expertise.
This round and the company’s current valuation at $700 million further reflects Exa’s ambitious vision and the growing importance of AI-native search infrastructure in the tech ecosystem.
