Exa

Exa builds an AI-native web search engine and API designed for large language models and AI agents rather than human browsers. The product spans a search API, a crawling and contents API, a deep-research endpoint, and structured-output extraction, returning token-efficient excerpts the company says cut input tokens by up to 20x. Rather than wrapping Google or Bing, Exa runs its own independent search stack: crawlers indexing more than 500 billion URLs, embedding models trained from scratch to retrieve semantically (learning to predict the next link rather than the next token), and a Rust vector database on a self-owned H200 GPU cluster. Founded in 2021 as Metaphor by Will Bryk (CEO) and Jeffrey Wang, Harvard computer-science alumni who met as freshmen, the company pivoted to an API-first model for AI systems in early 2023. More than 5,000 companies and 400,000 developers use its products, including Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, and monday.com. Exa raised a $250M Series C in May 2026 led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation, with Benchmark, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Y Combinator participating. Legal entity: Exa Labs Inc.