Exa Labs, the AI search startup building a search engine specifically for AI agents, has closed a $250 million funding round at a $2.2 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, more than tripling its valuation since last fall and signaling that investors see significant room for new players as the search market undergoes its most significant shift since ChatGPT arrived.
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The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, which is making a pointed bet on the next era of search. Sarah Wang, a general partner at the firm who worked on the deal, noted that Andreessen’s own history traces back to Netscape, and that the firm sees AI agents as the next tectonic shift in how people interact with the web.
“Literally, the DNA is at our firm,” Wang said. “As we think about AI—this is the mother of all waves. We also think we are entering a new era for search.”
Exa CEO William Bryk said the company is betting that agents will search the web more than humans for the first time this year, a milestone he describes as an important turning point. “There are billions of humans doing searches—there are going to be trillions of agents, like, very soon,” Bryk said in an interview. “So we just want to accelerate on all fronts.”
The company, which has about 100 employees and offices in San Francisco, Zurich, and Singapore, has grown its customer query volume from roughly 100 million per month in April of last year to about 1 billion per month in April of this year. Customers include Cursor, Cognition, and HubSpot. Exa has also partnered with Google to give Gemini access to its search engine.
Exa is part of a broader wave of AI search startups—including Tavily, TinyFish, and Parallel Web Systems (led by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, which recently raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation from Sequoia)—that are all vying to serve the coming world where AI agents search on users’ behalf rather than humans clicking through links.
The other side of the valuation
The $2.2 billion figure is an extraordinary vote of confidence in Exa’s vision. But as our coverage of the AI scraping economy has detailed, Exa’s business model is inseparable from that valuation story. Exa (formerly known as Metaphor) is in the business of selling publisher content to AI companies. Its search engine is built to serve AI agents. The customers paying for that access are building products that use publisher content as raw material.
The economics have been a point of contention. Researcher Matthew Scott Goldstein, who has been tracking the data broker layer between publishers and AI companies, identified 21 vendors operating in this space in a recent report, Exa among them. “Publishers create it. Exa crawls it. AI companies buy it. Publishers get nothing,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Exa has not disclosed its revenue. It has not announced any licensing agreements with publishers. And the company is now valued, by one of the most prominent venture firms in the world, at $2.2 billion—built on infrastructure that runs through content publishers produce.
The question of whether and how AI search companies will compensate publishers for the content that powers them has not been answered. The Andreessen Horowitz investment suggests investors believe the AI search market is real and large. What it does not resolve is who bears the cost of producing the content that makes these search engines worth building.
