Exa raises $250M Series C to build search engine for AI agents

Exa, a real-time AI search engine provider, announced a $250 million Series C funding round led by a16z. The company offers a suite of APIs—including web search, web crawling, SERP, and deep research tools—designed for AI agents to search and extract structured content from websites and live data. Exa's platform is used by companies such as Cursor, AWS, Databricks, Groq, Gamma, monday.com, HubSpot, Lovable, Cognition, Browserbase, Klarna, and Anara. The funding will be used to further develop its search infrastructure and expand its capabilities to meet the growing demand from AI applications. Exa differentiates itself with low-latency responses (as fast as 450ms for standard search), token-efficient content extraction via its highlights model, and structured output schemas for enterprise use cases. In benchmarks, Exa outperforms Perplexity and Brave on the FRAMES, Tip-of-Tongue, and Seal0 retrieval benchmarks. The company's technology is already handling up to 25 trillion tokens per week for partners like OpenRouter. With this Series C, Exa aims to solidify its position as the search backbone for the AI ecosystem.