Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuation for its AI search tools

Exa Labs Inc. announced a $250 million funding round led by Andersen Horowitz, raising its valuation to $2.2 billion. The investment follows an $85 million Series B round in 2025, which included contributions from Nvidia Corp. and Y Combinator. Exa specializes in AI-powered search tools, with its fastest product, Exa Instant, completing queries in under 180 milliseconds—a claim the company positions as the industry’s fastest. The startup’s technology converts web data into embeddings using custom neural networks trained on Nvidia GPUs, enabling AI models to process billions of data points in under a tenth of a second. Exa stores critical files in CPU caches rather than RAM, optimizing speed and efficiency. Its proprietary software, exa-d, parallelizes data processing across multiple GPUs, while exa-a minimizes unnecessary file updates to enhance hardware utilization. Exa’s suite includes tools like Contents (full-text retrieval) and Exa Agent (multi-step workflows), with over 400,000 developers—including users at HubSpot and venture-backed startups—already adopting its services. The company argues its infrastructure outperforms competitors that rely on wrapped search engines, citing superior quality, latency, and cost efficiency. Funds will be used to scale AI infrastructure, enabling faster model training and processing hundreds of thousands of searches per second. Exa also plans to hire more go-to-market professionals to accelerate adoption. CEO Will Bryk emphasized the company’s commitment to building proprietary technology, stating that wrappers cannot match Exa’s performance as it expands capacity.