Exa Raises $250 Million Series C to Build the Search Engine for AIs

Exa, the search engine built for AI, led by Will Bryk, Jeff Wang, and the team, has raised $250M at a $2.2B valuation led by a16z to power all agents with the highest quality web search.

Exa already powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com, and more than 400,000 developers.

As LLM-driven search volume is expected to grow far beyond today’s Google search scale, the company sees an opportunity to fundamentally redesign how information is discovered and accessed.

Exa was founded five years ago to build a more comprehensive and higher-quality search system beyond traditional search engines.

In early 2023, the company launched one of the first web search APIs for AI products and agents, and has since grown to more than 5,000 customers. Exa positions itself as a high-quality search API across different latency and pricing tiers.

Exa has developed specialized search capabilities for different AI agent use cases.

For GTM agents, the platform provides a comprehensive search across people and company data. For coding agents, it offers optimized search over public code and technical documentation using fine-tuned embedding models. The company has also built a sub-200ms search API and fast text extraction models that reduce LLM token usage by more than 20x, helping chat agents operate faster and more efficiently.

Exa built its own web-scale search engine from scratch, with infrastructure spanning 500+ billion URLs, proprietary embedding models, and custom vector databases optimized for AI agents.

The company argues that most competitors rely on wrapping existing search engines, limiting their ability to compete on quality, latency, and cost.

With the new funding, Exa plans to train its next generation of models and scale infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands of searches per second.

The company is also expanding its team with talent from Meta, Yandex, and Google, while growing its go-to-market organization. Marcus Holm, President of LaunchDarkly, is joining as CRO to lead global sales and go-to-market efforts.

As trillions of AI agents come online, search demand is expected to grow far beyond today’s internet search volume, while requirements for freshness, precision, and comprehensiveness become significantly higher than those needed for human users.

Exa believes building a highly reliable, large-scale search engine is essential infrastructure for the AI era, where both AI systems and humans increasingly depend on trustworthy, high-quality information.