Exa Raises $250M at a $2.2B Valuation
Exa (exa.ai), the search engine built for AI agents, has raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.2B valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator all participated in the round. a16z general partner Sarah Wang is joining Exa's board.
Exa came through YC's Summer 2021 batch with early seed backing from Pioneer Fund and Y Combinator, and has built steadily from there. The company raised a $17M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, followed by an $85M Series B led by Benchmark at a $700M valuation last September. The new round triples that valuation in under a year.
CEO Will Bryk announced the raise on LinkedIn, noting that Exa's search API now serves over 5,000 companies and 400,000 developers. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu, former OpenAI researcher Igor Babuschkin, and Tal Broda also joined the round as angel investors.
The company was founded by two best friends who met their freshman year at Harvard: CEO Will Bryk and co-founder Jeff Wang. Originally called Metaphor, the company rebranded to Exa in early 2024.
Exa powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com and over 400,000 developers. The Cursor integration is particularly notable: when you use @web in Cursor's chat, a separate model determines the search query from your message and conversation history, then sends it to Exa.
Unlike consumer search products like Perplexity, Exa is infrastructure. It's a web search API designed for AI agents and LLMs, using neural embeddings to understand query meaning rather than keyword matching. The company monetizes primarily through usage-based API pricing rather than seats.
"These are still the early days. In the next few years the number of searches from AI agents will be 1000x more than Google searches today."
That thesis from Bryk captures why Exa's valuation has climbed so quickly. As more AI agents ship into production, they all need web access, and Exa has positioned itself as the default search layer for that. Sarah Wang leads growth-stage investments across AI, enterprise applications, and infrastructure at a16z, and has backed companies including Cursor, Cognition, and Wiz, making her a natural fit for Exa's board.
Bryk said the company now has around 100 employees working toward what he calls "perfect search."