Exa raises $85M to build a search engine for AIs

AI search engine Exa announced an $85 million Series B funding round led by Benchmark at a $700 million valuation, with participation from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator. The company, which launched its first search engine in November 2022—just two weeks before ChatGPT's release—has since pivoted to serve the rapidly growing AI application market.

Peter Fenton from Benchmark, who has taken seven companies public, will join Exa's board as the company scales its search infrastructure designed specifically for artificial intelligence systems rather than human users.

Exa already serves thousands of customers ranging from AI development tools like Cursor to major private equity and consulting firms. The company positions itself as addressing fundamental differences between how AI systems and humans search the web, requiring faster speeds, comprehensive data access, and enterprise-grade privacy features.

The funding comes as AI applications increasingly require real-time web data access. Traditional search engines built for human browsing patterns struggle with AI systems' need for structured, high-volume data retrieval across multiple concurrent queries.

Exa built its search engine from scratch, allowing the company to offer zero data retention policies crucial for enterprise customers handling sensitive queries. The platform delivers sub-450ms latency and full webpage content rather than just links and snippets.

The company operates two main products: a traditional API for developers and "Websets," which provides comprehensive datasets for large-scale research applications. Nvidia's participation in the funding round signals validation from a key AI infrastructure player.

With the Series B capital, Exa plans to scale its indexing infrastructure to cover more of the world's information, expand its $5 million GPU cluster by 5x for research acceleration, and grow its engineering and go-to-market teams.

The company is hiring across engineering roles including backend, infrastructure, and machine learning research engineers, as well as go-to-market and operations positions as it enters what founder Will Bryk calls "stage two" of the company's development.