Exa – an AI research lab redesigning search – announced $22 million in seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), and Y Combinator. This funding will accelerate Exa’s goal of building the search engine for AI.
Exa essentially trains embedding models using the same technology behind ChatGPT, to convert web pages into lists of numbers known as embeddings. And the result is a technology that packs the power of large language models (LLMs) into the search process, making search smarter than keyword approaches like Google.
KEY QUOTES:
“Soon, AI will search the web more than humans. But search engines like Google were designed for humans, not AI. Whereas Google is optimized for human clicks, AI needs a search engine that’s powerful and precise enough to retrieve thousands of results with the best information. That’s where Exa comes in – we’re the first search engine built for AI.”
So far, thousands of companies and developers have integrated Exa, ranging from AI writing assistants helping students cite relevant papers, to VC firms sourcing highly specific startups, to AI research teams at companies like Databricks assembling large and high quality training datasets.
“My cofounder Jeff and I actually built a search engine together when we were roommates at Harvard. At the time, we thought crowdsourcing links would enable better search than Google. But now five years later, AI enables something much bigger. AI has the capacity to truly organize the web’s knowledge, and when we do that there will be many magical use cases beyond just a search API.”
– Exa CEO Will Bryk
“Exa represents the intersection of an incredible team, and a big vision for how AI applications will retrieve fresh knowledge. It’s impressive to see what Exa was able to build with such a small team and minimal resources. The three critical components of AI systems are compute, models, and data. Nvidia supplies the compute substrate. Anthropic, OpenAI and other foundation model companies train the models, and Exa can provide the critical data and knowledge layers. We’re thrilled to support them as they redefine how AI utilizes knowledge and ultimately search as a whole.”
– Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed
