Exa Raises $22MM to Build the Search Engine for AI
16 Julio 2024 - 8:19AM
Business Wire
Funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners will allow Exa to
scale their first search product and become the data layer for AI
applications.
Exa, an AI research lab redesigning search for the AI age,
announced $22M in seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed
Venture Partners, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA's
venture capital arm, and Y Combinator. This investment will
accelerate Exa’s mission to build the search engine for AI.
“Soon, AI will search the web more than humans,” said Exa CEO,
Will Bryk. “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.”
Exa trains embedding models, using the same technology behind
ChatGPT, to convert web pages into lists of numbers known as
embeddings. The result is a technology that packs the power of
large language models (LLMs) into the search process itself, making
search smarter than keyword approaches like Google. Smarter search
grounds AI applications in the most relevant world knowledge.
For example, on Google, a search for “companies in SF building
futuristic hardware” returns articles created by search engine
optimization (SEO) experts to attract human clicks. On Exa, the
same search returns a list of companies that match that description
– what was actually asked for.
“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,” said Guru Chahal, Partner at
Lightspeed. “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.”
So far, thousands of companies and developers have integrated
Exa, 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, high
quality training datasets.
“My cofounder Jeff and I actually built a search engine together
when we were roommates at Harvard,” said Will. “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.”
About Exa
Exa is an AI research lab redesigning search for AI. Exa’s
mission is to organize the world’s knowledge, enhancing AI
applications across industries. Exa’s API integrates seamlessly
into existing systems, providing developers with powerful tools to
enhance their AI applications. For more information, visit
exa.ai.
About Lightspeed
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital
firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in
the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the
past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of
entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally
including Affirm, Carta, Cato Networks, Epic Games, Faire, Forty
Seven, Guardant Health, Mulesoft, Navan, Netskope, Nutanix, Rubrik,
Sharechat, Snap, Udaan, Ultima Genomics and more. Lightspeed
currently manages $25B in AUM globally. www.lsvp.com
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240716151157/en/
Jeffrey Wang jeff@exa.ai