Exa, a research start-up specializing in artificial intelligence, has secured $22 million in Seed and Series A funding, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, NVIDIA, and Y Combinator. This funding will enable Exa to build a search engine specifically designed for AI, with the belief that “AI will search the web more than humans” and therefore needs a more powerful search engine than Google.
Redefining Search in the AI Era
Exa’s CEO, Will Bryk, explained that current search engines like Google are optimized for human clicks, but AI requires a search engine that is powerful and accurate enough to retrieve thousands of results with the best available information. Exa employs large language models (LLMs) in the search process, allowing it to return the most relevant results for search queries, rather than articles optimized for search engines, as Google does.
“AI will soon search the web more than humans,” Bryk stated. “Exa is the first search engine designed for AI.”
Technology and Operation of Exa
Exa trains embedding models using the same technology behind ChatGPT to turn web pages into lists of numbers known as embeddings. This technology incorporates the power of LLMs in the search process, making the search smarter than keyword-based approaches like Google. A search on Google for “companies in SF building futuristic hardware” might return articles created by SEO experts to attract human clicks, while Exa would return a list of companies matching that description.
Support from Investors
Guru Chahal, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, expressed excitement in supporting Exa: “Exa represents the intersection of an incredible team and a great vision of how AI applications will retrieve fresh insights. Nvidia provides the computing substrate. Anthropic, OpenAI, and other base model companies train the models, and Exa can provide critical layers of data and knowledge. We are excited to support them as they redefine how AI uses knowledge and ultimately search as a whole.”
Impact and Growth of Exa
Thousands of companies and developers have already integrated Exa, from AI writing assistants helping students cite relevant articles to venture capital firms seeking specific startups, and AI research teams in companies like Databricks assembling large datasets. The use of Exa is rapidly scaling, with revenues tripling in recent months.
“My co-founder Jeff and I built a search engine together when we were roommates at Harvard,” Will recalled. “At that time, we thought that collecting links through crowdsourcing would allow for better search than Google. But now, five years later, AI enables something much bigger. AI has the ability to truly organize the knowledge of the web, and when we do that, there will be many magical use cases beyond just a search API.”
About Exa
Exa is an AI research lab that is redesigning search for the AI era. Its mission is to organize the world’s knowledge, enhancing AI applications across various industries. Exa’s API seamlessly integrates into existing systems, providing developers with powerful tools to enhance their AI applications.