Clipto has raised $15 million at a $250 million post-money valuation.
The startup indexes video, audio, and documents on a user's computer for AI-powered search.
It says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch.
What happened
Clipto, a San Francisco-headquartered startup, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. The investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, and EnvisionX Capital.
Why it matters
The company indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files on a user's computer, allowing users to search by describing what they're looking for or by asking AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to find it for them. Founder Henry Kang says the core insight is that "we have too much content" and "too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn't being used."
What to watch
Clipto says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. The company reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis.
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Henry Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup's founding team. He cites his PhD work at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, where he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings and remembered where to find objects, as foundational. His second company, Zenvideo, was acquired by Tencent in 2020.
Clipto is entering a market where larger companies already control much of the data and software people use to manage it. Adobe offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos allow users to find photos and videos using natural-language descriptions. Kang says Clipto can search across videos, audio, images, and documents, while products from Adobe, Apple, and Google generally focus on files stored within their own services.
The new funding will go toward the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as integrations with more AI agents. The company has just over 20 employees split among the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) about two weeks ago, a standard that allows AI applications to connect with outside sources of information, with all processing running locally on the user's device.
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