Exa, an AI-native search infrastructure company building search tools for AI agents and applications, announced a $250 million Series C funding round at a reported $2.2 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz as the company accelerates development of search systems designed specifically for AI workloads rather than traditional human web browsing.
Founded roughly five years ago by co-founders Will Bryk and Jeff Wang, Exa has focused on creating a search engine optimized for AI systems that require comprehensive, real-time information retrieval. The company said its infrastructure is designed to support the growing demand from AI agents, coding assistants, enterprise copilots, and other generative AI applications that rely on fresh external data.
Exa said it plans to use the funding to train next-generation models, expand infrastructure capacity, and support systems capable of handling hundreds of thousands of searches per second. The company also noted it is scaling its engineering and research teams globally as demand for AI-native search infrastructure accelerates.
According to the company, its search tools are already being used by more than 5,000 businesses and over 400,000 developers, including companies such as HubSpot, monday.com, Cursor, OpenRouter, and Cognition.
The company argues that AI systems require fundamentally different search infrastructure than traditional search engines because agents process significantly larger volumes of information and require higher levels of freshness, comprehensiveness, and precision. Exa has built infrastructure that indexes hundreds of billions of URLs and has developed its own vector database technology to support large-scale retrieval operations.
Bryk said the emergence of AI agents will dramatically increase global search demand over the coming years, requiring new approaches to search infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES:
“As trillions of agents come online over the coming years, search needs will grow thousands of times beyond the total search volume of Google. And as agents make increasingly important business decisions, their requirements for comprehensiveness, freshness, and precision will far exceed what humans require. In short, agents will need perfect search over all the world’s information at an unprecedented scale.”
Will Bryk, Co-Founder And CEO, Exa
“Building a perfect search engine will be extremely hard. It’s also necessary. Information is critical civilizational infrastructure for our new AI reality.”
Will Bryk, Co-Founder And CEO, Exa
