The round was led by Benchmark at a $700m valuation, with participation from Lightspeed, YCombinator, and NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm. Peter Fenton from Benchmark will join our board. Peter‘s a legendary investor who’s taken 7 companies to IPO and who passionately shares our vision.
Exa already serves web search to thousands of companies, from AI startups like Cursor to top private equity and consulting firms. We’ve built a state-of-the-art search engine from scratch that is both the fastest and highest quality for AI applications.
That was all stage one. We now enter stage two.
Read More – MagicDoor Raises $4.5 M in Seed Funding
Origins of Exa
We started Exa in 2021 – far before AI needed search. We believed back then that the world needed a better search engine than Google and that we could build it.
So we bought a GPU cluster, built a large-scale indexing system, and tried (many) new techniques for searching the web.
Our goal was a search engine that gives users full control over the web in ways Google can’t – e.g. “give me all ML engineers in NYC who have a blog, and sort by years of experience”.
We launched our first search engine in November 2022. Two weeks later ChatGPT came out. We quickly started getting requests for API access to our search. People were building the first generation of AI apps, and those AI apps needed information from the web.
That’s when we realized – AIs need web search! In fact, we realized AIs would soon search the web FAR more than humans do.
Luckily, Exa was a perfect fit to be the search engine for these AIs.
What’s a search engine for AI?
Like humans, AIs don’t have all the world’s information in their heads. AIs need to search the web to get the most up-to-date and comprehensive information, whether news, code, research papers, company data, etc.
But AIs are very different creatures from humans. They require a new type of search engine. While traditional search engines were designed decades ago for humans, Exa is the only search engine designed for AIs to use. Here are some reasons why.
Read More – MagicDoor Raises $4.5 M in Seed Funding
