Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuation for its AI search tools
Search startup Exa Labs Inc. today announced that it has raised $250 million in funding to purchase more infrastructure.
The round was led by Andersen Horowitz. It comes less than a year after Exa’s previous raise, a $85 million Series B investment that included contributions from Nvidia Corp. and Y Combinator. The company is now valued at $2.2 billion.
Exa offers a suite of search services that artificial intelligence applications can use to browse the web. The fastest tool in the lineup, Exa Instant, takes under 180 milliseconds to complete queries. The company claims that it’s the speediest search service of its kind on the market.
Exa stores some of the web data that its services fetch for users in a custom vector database. According to the company, the system can query billions of embeddings in one tenth of a second while using less memory than a high-end personal computer. One of the contributors to the database’s speed is that it stores certain important files in the cache of central processing units instead of RAM.
