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

Search startup Exa Labs Inc. today announced that it has raised $250 million in funding to purchase more infrastructure.

The round was led by Andersen Horowitz. It comes less than a year after Exa’s previous raise, a $85 million Series B investment that included contributions from Nvidia Corp. and Y Combinator. The company is now valued at $2.2 billion.

Exa offers a suite of search services that artificial intelligence applications can use to browse the web. The fastest tool in the lineup, Exa Instant, takes under 180 milliseconds to complete queries. The company claims that it’s the speediest search service of its kind on the market.

Exa stores some of the web data that its services fetch for users in a custom vector database. According to the company, the system can query billions of embeddings in one tenth of a second while using less memory than a high-end personal computer. One of the contributors to the database’s speed is that it stores certain important files in the cache of central processing units instead of RAM.

Exa ingests public web data using another custom software platform called exa-d. It parallelizes key data processing tasks across multiple graphics cards, which makes it possible to perform them all at once instead of one after another. Additionally, exa-a skips many of the unnecessary file changes that data management systems often make when updating records. That approach further optimizes hardware utilization.

Exa’s search services turn web data into embeddings, mathematical structures that AI models can understand, before querying them. The company performs the task using custom neural networks called embedding models. It trains the algorithms on an in-house cluster of Nvidia graphics cards.

Exa offers its speed-optimized Exa Instant service alongside several other search tools. An offering called Contents enables AI applications to retrieve the full text of webpages. Another service, Exa Agent, facilitates multi-step search workflows. A market research agent, for example, could use it to find an e-commerce store’s most popular products and then enrich the list with customer feedback from a reviews site.

Exa says that its services have been adopted by more than 400,000 developers. Many of those users work at major tech firms such as HubSpot Inc. and venture-backed startups.

The company will use its funding round to expand its AI infrastructure. According to Extra, the hardware upgrades will enable it to train new AI models and process hundreds of thousands of searches per second. The software maker also plans to hire more go-to-market professionals.

“Most other search providers actually wrap other search engines and therefore cannot compete on quality/latency/cost,” Exa Chief Executive Officer Will Bryk wrote in a blog post. “As we scale up infra and model training in the coming months, the gap between Exa and wrappers will become clearer.”

Photo: Exa