Exa Raises $250 Million for AI-Powered Search Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence search infrastructure startup Exa is now a $2.2 billion company.

The company reached that valuation with a $250 million Series C funding round announced Wednesday (May 20). It is money that Exa says will help it train its next generation of models and scale its systems to support hundreds of thousands of searches per second.

“As trillions of agents come online over the coming years, search needs will grow thousands of times beyond the total search volume of Google,” Exa Co-Founder and CEO Will Bryk said in the company’s announcement.

“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.”

Exa says that — unlike traditional search engines designed for human users, Exa provides a web search API specifically optimized for AI products. The company operates its own independent search engine rather than acting as a “wrapper” for existing providers.

“As we scale up infra and model training in the coming months, the gap between Exa and wrappers will become clearer,” Bryk added. “For example, six months ago we were worse than Google at code search, and now we’re used by nearly every coding agent.”

Since launching its AI-focused API in early 2023, Exa’s customer base has grown to more than 5,000 companies, including Cursor , Cognition , HubSpot , OpenRouter , and Monday.com .

The funding announcement comes one day after Google unveiled what it called the most significant update to its Search function in 25 years.

“Every product search, price check and restaurant booking has started the same way since 1998: Type something short, get a list of links,” PYMNTS wrote.

“That model is 25 years old,” the report added, and Google has announced “it’s done with it.”

In its place is a redesigned interface that accepts text, images, documents, video and open browser tabs and replies with synthesized answers instead of a ranked list of links. In tandem, Google debuted persistent AI agents in Search that monitor topics and push notifications without needing to be prompted.

The company said that — one year after its debut — AI Mode has topped 1 billion monthly users, queries more than doubling each quarter. Liz Reid, the tech giant’s VP of Search, told reporters query volume hit an all-time high last quarter. Google Search and advertising revenue came to $60.4 billion for the first quarter, rising 19% year over year. That went against predictions AI-generated answers would cannibalize Search’s ad business .