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.

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.

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OpenAI is strengthening its approach to identifying AI-generated content, announcing a multi-layered provenance system that combines cryptographic metadata, invisible watermarking, and a public verification tool, though the company acknowledges no single method is foolproof.

The centerpiece of the update is a new partnership with Google DeepMind to embed SynthID watermarking into images generated through ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API. SynthID, Google’s invisible watermarking technology, is designed to survive transformations like screenshots and file format changes that can strip standard metadata from content.

The two approaches are meant to work together. C2PA — the open technical standard backed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a cross-industry group — uses metadata and cryptographic signatures to carry information about where content came from, who created it, and how it was edited. But that metadata can be lost. SynthID provides a backup signal that persists through more transformations.

“C2PA helps content carry detailed context; SynthID helps preserve a signal when metadata does not survive,” OpenAI said in a blog post. “Together, they make provenance more resilient than either layer would be on its own.”

OpenAI also became a C2PA Conforming Generator Product — meaning platforms can now reliably read, preserve, and pass along the provenance information attached to OpenAI-generated content. The company has been adding Content Credentials to images since 2024, when it began with DALL·E 3, later extending to ImageGen and Sora.

A public verification tool

OpenAI is also previewing a public verification tool at openai.com/verify that lets people check whether an uploaded image was generated on ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, or Codex. The tool checks for both Content Credentials and SynthID watermarks.

The approach is deliberately cautious. If no metadata or watermark is detected, the tool will not conclude the image was not generated with OpenAI tools — since provenance signals can be stripped.

“If no metadata or watermark is detected, for example, the tool will not make a definitive conclusion about whether the image was generated with OpenAI tools since provenance signals can in some cases be stripped,” the company said.

At launch, the verification tool is limited to content generated by OpenAI. The company said it aims to support cross-industry verification across platforms in the coming months.

The limits of provenance

The announcement arrives as the question of AI content authentication has become acutely relevant. A Florida Tribune investigation published this week identified a network of AI-generated fake local news sites — complete with fabricated reporters and AI-recycled content — built specifically to manipulate search results. Provenance tools like SynthID and C2PA would not have prevented that scheme, which used content scraped from real outlets and processed through AI. But they could make it harder for the operators of such sites to pass their output as genuinely human-produced.

“No single provenance technique is enough on its own,” OpenAI acknowledged. The company’s answer is the layered approach — shared standards, durable watermarking, and public verification — in the hope of building “a more interoperable provenance ecosystem” over time.

The broader industry has been moving in similar directions. Adobe has embedded Content Credentials in its Firefly-generated images, and Google has been rolling out SynthID across its own products. But adoption remains voluntary, and the tools do nothing to address content that was AI-generated before provenance standards existed — or content deliberately created outside these systems.

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