Exa

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.

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

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

• AI search API
• Neural search engine
• Web research API
• Agentic search infrastructure
• Web crawling API

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices2 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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'.
4. Websets API consumption: Async Websets product (search, import, enrichment, monitor operations) sold as a usage-based API to GTM/RevOps and research teams.
5. 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

Go-to-market motion4 records

Distribution channels4 records

Marketing channels8 records

Core 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

Named customers15 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration18 records

AI capability10 records

Feature10 records

Partnerships

Ten partnerships are on record, tiered flagship, minor and core.

• Google (Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise)flagshipStrategic or Co-development Partner · 28 April 2026Google 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.iominorGTM or Marketing Partner · 23 March 2026Awarded 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.
• AnthropiccoreTechnology or IntegrationExa 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.
• VercelcoreTechnology or IntegrationNative 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.
• OpenAIcoreTechnology or IntegrationExa 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.
• BrowserbasecoreTechnology or IntegrationJoint agentic browsing offering combining Exa's neural search with Browserbase's browser infrastructure. Co-marketed in demos and case studies.
• ElevenLabscoreTechnology or IntegrationCo-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 / LlamaIndexcoreTechnology or IntegrationOfficial 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)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerAnnounced 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.
• DatadogcoreTechnology or IntegrationFeatured 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

Direct 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

• Xx.com/exaailabs
• GitHubgithub.com/exa-labs
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/exa-ai

Compliance4 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles4 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds5 records

Investors15 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments1 record

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Exa