Clipto raises $15M for AI media search

San Francisco-based AI startup Clipto has raised $15 million in an all-equity funding round, reaching a post-money valuation of $250 million. The three-year-old company, founded in 2023, uses artificial intelligence to index and search through terabytes of video, audio, and document files stored on a user's local computer.

Investors in the round include HSG, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, and individual backers Hans Tung and Lu Zhang. The company also maintains teams in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The Problem of Content Overload

Clipto was founded on the premise that the generative AI era has created a surplus, not a shortage, of content. Founder Henry Kang told TechCrunch that the core insight driving the company is that "we have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used." While many AI firms focus on creating new material, Clipto is built to help users find and reuse files they already own but cannot easily locate. Generative AI is making it easier to produce more content and harder to keep track of it, a problem Clipto aims to solve.

Kang has a long history with the problem of organizing digital information. As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects, and remembered where to find them. He later applied similar concepts to a startup that used AI to manage a user's wardrobe and to ZenVideo, a video creation tool acquired by Tencent in 2020.

From Creators to Professionals

Clipto initially targeted video creators struggling with footage scattered across drives. That group now represents only about one-quarter to one-third of its user base. The platform has expanded to serve a wide range of professionals including lawyers, doctors, researchers, and marketers. For these users, finding specific files can be as challenging as tracking a team's fixtures or a player's stats.

The company claims more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang declined to give a precise subscriber count but stated a significant portion stay subscribed for over two years. Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis, according to its founder. The firm employs just over 20 people across its three regions.

How the AI Search Platform Works

Users can search their indexed files by describing what they need or by asking external AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to find it for them. All processing is done locally on the user's device, without requiring cloud services.

About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for connecting AI applications to external data sources. Kang emphasized that access to indexed files requires active user request and authorization. When an AI tool accesses Clipto's data, it can only retrieve information within the user-specified scope.

Competing in a Crowded Field

Clipto faces competition from large companies that already integrate AI search into their products. Adobe offers AI-powered search in Premiere Pro. Apple Photos and Google Photos allow natural-language search within their ecosystems. As videos, recordings, and documents accumulate, companies like these are using AI to make files searchable.

Kang argues Clipto's advantage is its ability to search across diverse file types to videos, audio, images, and documents regardless of where they are stored locally. Competitors' products generally focus on files within their own services. Clipto also uniquely allows users to make selected information available to external AI tools like ChatGPT, betting there is room for a separate product in this market. The new $15 million in funding will be used for AI models and computing infrastructure to run Clipto on consumer hardware, and for building integrations with more AI agents.