Quarter Billion in Funds for AI Search Innovator Exa

San Francisco firm Exa Labs Inc. has raised $250m in Series C funding, at a valuation of $2.2 billion, for use in training the next generation of its models and scaling its AI-native search engine and web data retrieval platform. It will also continue hiring for senior roles.

Exa was formed in 2021 with the aim of developing software that would go 'far beyond traditional search engines in quality and comprehensiveness.' In 2023 it announced what it says was the 'first' web search API for AI, and today more than 5,000 companies use its search products, including the likes of Cognition, OpenRouter and HubSpot.

Features include 'extremely comprehensive' search where people and companies are concerned, for GTM agents; complex searches over public code / technical documentation for coding agents; and super-fast search API and text extraction models for chat products. The company says it has spent 'years' building a web-scale search engine from scratch, and notes that its crawlers now track more than 500 billion URLs.

Exa is led by CEO Will Bryk, and recently appointed Marcus Holm as CRO, leading its global GTM organization.

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Y Combinator, alongside angel investors. Sarah Wang of Andreessen Horowitz joins Exa's Board of Directors in conjunction with the funding.

The firm is online at www.exa.ai .