When we led Exa’s Series A two years ago, agents were a research curiosity. When we doubled down at the Series B, they were starting to take off, and with them, demand for high-quality knowledge retrieval. Today, agents are increasingly the consumers of the web, and Exa has become one of the default search layers underneath them.
That’s why we’re tripling down on Exa as part of their $250M Series C, alongside our friends at Andreessen Horowitz, who led, Benchmark, Y Combinator, and NVIDIA Ventures.
The thesis got bigger, not smaller
Every meaningful AI product — coding agents, research systems, enterprise copilots, voice AI, GTM intelligence — depends on fresh external information as a core input. LLMs are frozen in time. Search is how they stay current, accurate, and grounded. We believe the companies that figure out retrieval first will define the next generation of AI products, and the rest will be playing catch-up.
And the scale is staggering. Agents already search orders of magnitude more than humans do, and that gap is widening fast. Exa is winning the agentic world one vertical at a time. Between the B and the C, they built some of the best search for coding agents, and now help power the category leaders like Cursor and Cognition.
You can’t win this market by retrofitting consumer search engines. We believe you win it by building search from the ground up for how AI actually works. That’s exactly what Exa has done.
Why developers keep choosing Exa
Exa indexes billions of documents, runs them through custom embedding and ranking models, and serves them through a search stack built for how agents actually query: long, complex, paragraph-length prompts that traditional search was never designed to handle.
The benchmarks tell one story: relevance, latency, especially time to first token, which is what makes user-facing agents feel responsive. But the customer behavior tells a stronger one. Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, Gamma, OpenRouter, and over 400,000 developers — the companies setting the pace in AI are all reaching for Exa first.
The team
No ordinary team takes on rebuilding search from scratch. Will and Jeff started working on this in their Harvard dorm a decade ago, years before ChatGPT, betting that transformers would fundamentally change how we access information. That mission, what Will calls “organizing the world’s knowledge, but this time for AI,” has since attracted some of the strongest search and ML talent on the planet, with engineers and researchers joining from Yandex, Meta, and Google Research. That clarity of conviction, paired with technical depth, developer-first instincts, and relentless hustle, is what makes them the team to do this.
What's next
Exa’s roadmap is ambitious: power every AI product, extend the index well beyond the public web, and become the data layer for an agent-driven internet. Google won the first search war by organizing information for people. We believe Exa is positioned to win the next one by organizing it for agents. We’re proud to keep backing Will, Jeff, and the Exa team as they build it.
If you want to work on industry-changing, high-impact, massive-scale challenges, apply at exa.ai/careers.
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