Exa

Overview

Exa builds a web search engine and API for AI agents and LLMs (“the search engine for AIs”). Founded 2021 (date not verified), headquartered in San Francisco; Will Bryk is co-founder and CEO. The vendor states that it runs its own web-scale index rather than wrapping existing engines, tracking over 500 billion URLs with custom embedding models and vector databases (Exa Series C post).

Products

• Exa Search API (neural/semantic search, people and company indexes for GTM agents, code search for coding agents). Compare: AI search APIs overview, Perplexity Search API.
• Customers and usage as stated by Exa (2026-05, vendor self-claims): Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com; 400,000+ developers and 5,000+ companies.

Funding

• 2024-07: earlier round reportedly USD 17M with Lightspeed, Nvidia and Y Combinator (TechCrunch headline only; not verified).
• 2026-05-20: Series C of USD 250M at USD 2.2B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Per the same post, Marcus Holm (ex-LaunchDarkly president) joined as Chief Revenue Officer.

Sources

• https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-c (fetched 2026-10-05)
• https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/exa-raises-17m-lightspeed-nvidia-ycombinator-google-ai-models (headline only)

Open items

• The Series B (USD 85M) mentioned in the earlier draft was not re-verified and is omitted.