Exa
Exa operates a proprietary AI-native web search platform (own crawlers, embeddings, vector DB) serving AI agents, coding assistants, and enterprise GTM teams via usage-based APIs. Founded 2021 in San Francisco; 5,000+ business customers and 400,000+ developers, including Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and monday.com.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2021
- HeadquartersSan Francisco, United States
- Headcount101–250
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Exa does
Exa (legal entity: Exa Labs Inc., formerly Metaphor) is a San Francisco-based, venture-backed AI infrastructure company founded in 2021 by Will Bryk and Jeffrey Wang. The company operates a proprietary end-to-end neural search stack built from the ground up — its own web crawlers tracking over 500 billion URLs, custom embedding models (including code-specialized variants), and proprietary vector databases — rather than wrapping Google or Bing. This stack powers a portfolio of AI-native retrieval and research products: the Search API (with fast, auto, deep-lite, deep, and deep-reasoning tiers), Exa Instant (sub-200ms neural search), the Contents API, the asynchronous Exa Agent for multi-step research and entity enrichment, Websets for structured collection building, Monitors for change detection, and the Highlights extraction model that delivers up to 90% token reduction versus full-page text. Specialized vertical indexes cover 70M+ companies, 1B+ people refreshed 50M+ times weekly, and code, news, and research-paper corpora.
The company serves AI agents, AI-native applications, and GTM/RevOps teams that require comprehensive, fresh, and structured web data at machine-scale throughput, with disclosed customers and partners including Cursor, Cognition (Devin), HubSpot, monday.com, OpenRouter, AWS, Vercel, Datadog, Browserbase, ElevenLabs, Groq, Gamma, and Sarvam. Distribution combines a self-serve API/dashboard (acquiring 400,000+ developers), direct enterprise sales for SOC 2 Type II / HIPAA / Zero Data Retention / SSO contracts, and channel partnerships including Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Marketplace.
Exa monetizes primarily via usage-based API billing ($5–$15 per 1,000 requests across tiers, plus per-ACU Agent compute from $0.012 to $1.00 per run), augmented by subscription enterprise contracts, with the global GTM organization being formalized in mid-2026 under newly appointed CRO Marcus Holm (ex-LaunchDarkly President). Over three funding rounds the company has raised approximately $357 million from Lightspeed, Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and NVIDIA (NVentures), most recently a $250M Series C at a $2.2B valuation in May 2026, and in April 2026 opened its first Asia office in Singapore.
Exa firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Exa
- Legal name
- EXA LABS INC.
- Website
- https://exa.ai
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2021
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 101–250 employees
- Short description
- Exa operates a proprietary AI-native web search platform (own crawlers, embeddings, vector DB) serving AI agents, coding assistants, and enterprise GTM teams via usage-based APIs. Founded 2021 in San Francisco; 5,000+ business customers and 400,000+ developers, including Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and monday.com.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Exa industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Search Infrastructure / Web Search API
- NAICS
- Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (519290), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Enterprise Search, Indexing & Content Discovery (HDAEAGAH)
- akta.pro secondary industry
- Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs) (HDAEANAH)
Keywords
Where Exa is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- San Francisco
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices2 records
Markets served
Exa business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- Usage-based API (Search): Primary revenue stream. Customers pay per 1,000 requests on the Search API. Tiered pricing: fast ($7/1k), auto, deep ($12–15/1k), plus Exa Instant at $5/1k. Customers can cap or expand spend via tier choice.
- Usage-based Agent Compute Units (ACU): Revenue from the Exa Agent endpoint, billed per Agent Compute Unit (1 ACU = $0.10) plus $0.005 per search tool call. Effort modes price each run: minimal $0.012, low $0.025, medium $0.10, high $0.50, xhigh $1.00. Contact enrichment billed separately ($0.02/email, $0.07/phone).
- Enterprise contracts (ZDR, HIPAA, SSO, team): Enterprise contracts offering Zero Data Retention, HIPAA mode, SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO, team management, and rate-limit/quota expansion. Sales-led motion via 'Contact Sales'.
- Websets API consumption: Async Websets product (search, import, enrichment, monitor operations) sold as a usage-based API to GTM/RevOps and research teams.
- Strategic grants and ecosystem funding: Exa awards strategic grants (e.g., to BeatAI.io) to accelerate ecosystem adoption of its search platform, effectively a GTM/ecosystem investment rather than a primary revenue stream.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Usage-based | Pay-as-you-go | Search API: $7 per 1,000 requests (fast ~450ms); auto and deep variants priced separately; deep endpoint at $12–15/1k. |
| Usage-based | Pay-as-you-go | Exa Instant: $5 per 1,000 requests (sub-200ms neural search). |
| Usage-based | Pay-as-you-go | Exa Agent: usage-based with $0.005/search + 1 ACU = $0.10; effort tiers from $0.012 (minimal) to $1.00 (xhigh) per request. |
| Freemium | Pay-as-you-go | Free trial / freemium entry: 'Try API for free' via dashboard.exa.ai. |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise tier (quote-based): ZDR, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA mode, SSO, team management, custom rate limits. |
Go-to-market motion4 records
Distribution channels4 records
Marketing channels8 records
Exa product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Exa provides an AI-native web search platform delivered as a unified API for AI agents and LLM applications, offering Search, Contents extraction, Deep Search, Exa Agent (async multi-step research), Websets, Monitors, Exa Instant (sub-200ms neural search), and Highlights (token-efficient extraction). The platform is purpose-built for machine consumers rather than human search, supporting specialized vertical indexes for companies, people, code, news, and research papers, with structured JSON outputs, grounding citations, and enterprise-grade security (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ZDR, SSO).
Product overview
Exa offers a unified AI-native search platform built around one core API for web search, content extraction, and research agents, complemented by several specialized modules and a library of demos and benchmarks. At the center is the Search API (with the Search, Deep Search, Contents, and Exa Agent endpoints), which is augmented by the Websets collection/enrichment API, the Monitors endpoint, the Exa Highlights content-extraction model, and the Exa Instant low-latency neural search product. Together, these power a portfolio of pre-built demos (voice agent, chatbot, shopping, paper search, people/company enrichment, GTM intelligence, security signals, etc.) and open-source evaluation suites (WebCode, People Search Benchmark, Company Search Benchmark) used by 400,000+ developers and 5,000+ businesses including Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com, and AWS.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Exa Instant: Sub-200ms neural search engine designed for real-time agentic workflows and voice agents.
- Exa Agent
- Websets
Products and services
- Search API Natural-language web search API for AI agents with multiple search types (auto, fast, instant, deep-lite, deep, deep-reasoning), category filters (company, people, news, research paper, personal site, financial report), domain filters, and options for highlights, full text, and summaries. Priced from ~$7 per 1k requests.
- Contents API Extracts clean, LLM-ready web content (text, highlights, summaries) from any list of URLs, handling JavaScript-rendered pages, PDFs, and complex layouts. Supports subpage crawling with targeted filtering and configurable freshness via maxAgeHours and livecrawl timeout.
- Deep Search Higher-latency agentic deep-research search endpoint that returns grounded, structured outputs from multi-step web research across company, people, news, coding, and other verticals. Available in deep-lite, deep, and deep-reasoning variants with pricing of $12–15 per 1k requests.
- Exa Agent Asynchronous, usage-based endpoint that runs long-running list building, enrichment, and deep-research workflows, returning natural-language answers, schema-validated JSON, field-level grounding citations, and per-run cost breakdowns. Supports configurable effort levels (minimal/low/medium/high/xhigh/auto), streaming SSE, and follow-up runs via previousRunId.
- Websets Async-first API for finding, verifying, and processing web data at scale into structured Webset containers of WebsetItems (companies, people, research papers) with enrichment agents, monitors, imports, webhooks, and event-driven updates.
- Monitors API endpoint for continuously monitoring the web for new content matching defined criteria, notifying users when items are found.
- Exa Instant Sub-200ms neural search engine built on Exa's proprietary end-to-end neural search stack (not a wrapper of Google/Bing), positioned as a low-latency primitive for real-time RAG and agentic workflows. Priced at $5 per 1,000 requests; up to 15x faster than Tavily and Brave per Exa benchmarks.
- Grounding with Exa (for Google Gemini Enterprise) Exa Agent product available as a launch partner on Gemini Enterprise's Agent Marketplace and as 'Grounding with Exa Web Search' within Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, anchoring Gemini responses in fresh web results pulled by Exa at request time.
Quantifiable outcome
- 90% token reduction via Highlights
- +5 more outcomes
Companies that use Exa
Customer profileNamed customers15 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Exa technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration18 records
AI capability10 records
Feature10 records
Exa partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Ten partnerships are on record, tiered flagship, minor and core.
- Google (Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise)flagshipGoogle released 'Grounding with Exa Web Search' in Private Preview within Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, anchoring Gemini responses in fresh web results pulled by Exa at request time. At Google Next, Exa shipped its Exa Agent as a launch partner on Gemini Enterprise's new Agent Marketplace, letting users run Exa web research directly inside Gemini Enterprise without separate procurement.
- BeatAI.iominorAwarded BeatAI.io a strategic grant to accelerate AI-driven services for creative industries (music, video, media production), extending Exa's ecosystem in the creator economy.
- AnthropiccoreExa offers a native Anthropic Tool Calling integration, enabling Claude-based agents to call Exa Search/Contents/Agent directly. Tutorial content also covers using exa-mcp-server with Claude Desktop.
- VercelcoreNative Exa integration with the Vercel AI SDK, allowing developers building on Next.js/Vercel to call Exa search and contents as a first-class tool.
- OpenAIcoreExa provides OpenAI Tool Calling, OpenAI SDK compatibility, and an OpenAI Responses API integration, enabling OpenAI-powered agents and the OpenAI Agents SDK to use Exa as a search/contents tool.
- BrowserbasecoreJoint agentic browsing offering combining Exa's neural search with Browserbase's browser infrastructure. Co-marketed in demos and case studies.
- ElevenLabscoreCo-built the Exa Voice Agent demo using ElevenLabs Scribe (STT) and ElevenLabs Flash TTS with Exa Instant search — featured as a flagship reference implementation.
- LangChain / CrewAI / LlamaIndexcoreOfficial Exa integrations in LangChain, CrewAI, and LlamaIndex frameworks, plus the standalone Exa MCP server for Claude/Cursor and other MCP-compatible agents.
- World (Tools for Humanity)coreAnnounced as a Proof-of-Human implementation partner at the World Lift Off event (April 17, 2026). Exa is integrating with World ID / AgentKit to verify that AI agents are operated by verified humans, alongside Zoom, DocuSign, Tinder, Okta, and Browserbase.
- DatadogcoreFeatured Exa Agent demos for Datadog account enrichment and Datadog Security Signals, showing per-run agent cost (~$0.20–$0.80) across hundreds of enterprise accounts.
Scale indicators13 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights7 records
Exa competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Tavily: AI search API purpose-built for AI agents and LLM applications, directly competing with Exa on neural retrieval, structured outputs, and developer-first pricing. Frequently cited as Exa's closest head-to-head competitor in benchmarks.
- Parallel Web Systems: AI-native web tools and search APIs targeting AI agents, with benchmark performance comparable to Exa in agentic search evaluations (top-4 in AIMultiple's 2026 benchmark alongside Exa).
- Brave Search: Independent web search engine with a public Search API used by AI applications, directly competing with Exa on retrieval quality, latency, and developer adoption. Exa claims up to 15x faster than Brave on its Instant benchmark.
- You.com: AI-first search engine offering developer APIs for AI applications and agents. Competes with Exa in AI-grade web retrieval and structured answer generation.
- Firecrawl: Web crawling and scraping API for AI applications, including structured content extraction. Frequently paired or compared with Exa in agent pipelines, and named alongside Exa in the 2026 AIMultiple top-4 ranking.
- SerpApi: Real-time search engine results API aggregating Google, Bing, and other engines. Competes with Exa as a structured web data source for AI agents and applications, though Exa differentiates by not being a wrapper of traditional search engines.
Broad incumbents
- Perplexity: AI answer engine combining web search with LLMs. While primarily a consumer/enterprise product rather than a developer API, Perplexity overlaps with Exa's 'grounded AI answers from the web' proposition and competes for the same end use cases.
- Microsoft Bing Web Search API: Hyperscaler-scale search API from Microsoft, used as a fallback or supplement for AI workloads. Represents the broader competitive backdrop — including Copilot integration — that Exa positions itself against as an independent, AI-native alternative.
Emerging players
- Kagi: Premium independent search engine beginning to offer API access. Competes with Exa on retrieval quality and an alternative-to-Google positioning, though its commercial API focus is still emerging.
- Browserbase: Browser infrastructure for AI agents providing headless browser automation. Direct integration partner of Exa but also an adjacent substitute when agents need full browser-rendered web content.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat8 records
Key risks7 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Exa social profiles
Digital presenceExa compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance4 records
Exa financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Exa leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles4 records
Exa funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds5 records
Investors15 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Exa M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments1 record
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Exa
What does Exa do?
Exa provides an AI-native web search platform delivered as a unified API for AI agents and LLM applications, offering Search, Contents extraction, Deep Search, Exa Agent (async multi-step research), Websets, Monitors, Exa Instant (sub-200ms neural search), and Highlights (token-efficient extraction). The platform is purpose-built for machine consumers rather than human search, supporting specialized vertical indexes for companies, people, code, news, and research papers, with structured JSON outputs, grounding citations, and enterprise-grade security (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ZDR, SSO).
Is Exa a public or private company?
Exa is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Exa founded?
Exa was founded in 2021. It employs 101 to 250 people.
Where is Exa based?
Exa is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, in the North America region.
How does Exa make money?
Five revenue lines are on record. Usage-based API (Search) is the primary driver. The others are usage-based Agent Compute Units (ACU), enterprise contracts (ZDR, HIPAA, SSO, team), websets API consumption and strategic grants and ecosystem funding.
Who are Exa's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Tavily, Parallel Web Systems, Brave Search, You.com, Firecrawl and SerpApi. Broad incumbents are Perplexity and Microsoft Bing Web Search API. Emerging players are Kagi and Browserbase.
Does Exa have an API?
Yes. Exa offers a public REST API at https://api.exa.ai with endpoints for Search (/search), Contents (/contents), Answer, and an asynchronous Agent (/agent/runs) for multi-step research and enrichment. Authentication is via the x-api-key header or Authorization: Bearer. The company publishes official Python (exa-py) and JavaScript/TypeScript (exa-js) SDKs, an OpenAPI specification, and an MCP server (exa-mcp-server) for use with Claude Desktop and other MCP-compatible clients. Rate limits and usage-based pricing apply, and an Enterprise tier supports HIPAA compliance mode, Zero Data Retention (ZDR), SSO, and HIPAA-safe processing. Developer documentation is at exa.ai/docs/reference/search-api-guide.
What industry is Exa in?
Exa's product category is AI Search Infrastructure / Web Search API. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEAGAH, Enterprise Search, Indexing & Content Discovery, with a secondary code of HDAEANAH, Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs). Its NAICS code is 519290 and its SIC code is 7372.