Exa, an AI research lab situated in San Francisco, California, has raised $22 million in seed and Series A funding to rethink the search for the AI age.
Exa CEO, Will Bryk, in a statement, confirmed that the round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and Y Combinator.
The company claims it is developing a tool that will enable AI models to carry out tasks akin to web searches, but with a native AI experience.
The co-founders invested a million dollars in GPUs, which were more readily available back then.
They then started to develop a machine learning model that was trained to comprehend links rather than words and phrases natively by using a vector database and embeddings rather than the traditional transformer-based LLM.
“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.”
According to the company, two best friends, Will Bryk (now 27) and Jeff Wang (26), who met in their freshman year at Harvard, created the company roughly a year before ChatGPT was introduced.
“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.
Commenting on the funding, Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed said: “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.”
We earlier reported that African fintech startup, NALA, has secured $40 million in Series A funding to help fund its international expansion and build its payment rails, which will improve the dependability of payments to Africa.
