San Francisco-based AI search infrastructure startup, Exa (formerly Metaphor), has raised $85 million in a Series B round at a $700 million valuation led by Benchmark. Lightspeed, Y Combinator, and NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, participated in the round.
Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, a veteran investor who has guided seven companies to IPO, will join Exa’s board as a part of the transaction.
Entering stage two
William Bryk, the company CEO, said, “We’ve come far, but everything we said was just stage one of Exa. With this funding, we enter stage two.” The San Francisco company’s goal is to create “a perfect search system with well-organised information.”
To achieve this, the company will use the money to enhance its indexing and processing capabilities, expand its GPU cluster five times for faster research and the development of new techniques for organising information more effectively, and grow its team to support these objectives.
The cluster described by the company comprises 144 Nvidia H200 GPUs and 3,456 central processing units.
Building a perfect search engine for AI, not humans
Exa is a search engine and API platform established in 2021 by William Bryk and Jeffrey Wang.
“We believed back then that the world needed a better search engine than Google and that we could build it,” said Bryk.
It is designed specifically for artificial intelligence agents to deliver immediate access to global knowledge.
“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,” explains Bryk.
Unlike traditional search engines, Exa focuses on providing high-quality information without any ads or SEO tricks. “We have no ads and thus have no perverse incentives other than the highest quality search possible,” added Bryk.
Each search result is accompanied by full-page content, making it easy for AIs to find all the necessary details. For more in-depth searches, it offers a feature called Websets, which can provide extensive lists of data.
The company says that users can customise their search experience to fit specific needs, like excluding certain topics or targeting particular types of information. Most importantly, the company maintains strict privacy standards by ensuring that no query data is stored, adhering to a Zero-Data-Retention policy.
Currently, Exa’s technology has been adopted by AI startups such as Cursor, as well as top private equity and consulting firms. “Our vision isn’t just to build better search than what exists today,” Bryk added. “Our goal is perfect search — a world where all information is fully organised and accessible.”
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