Apps & Consumer
AI media-search startup Clipto raises $15M at a $250M valuation
Three-year-old Clipto, which uses AI to index files on a user's computer, raised $15 million at a $250 million valuation.
Clipto, a San Francisco-headquartered startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. Investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures.
Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files stored on a user’s computer, letting them search by describing what they’re looking for, or by asking ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to find it for them. Founder Henry Kang has worked on related problems for roughly two decades: as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, he built robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects, and remembered where to find them. He later applied a similar idea to his first startup, which used AI to track the clothes in a user’s closet and suggest outfits, and to his second company, Zenvideo, a video-creation startup acquired by Tencent in 2020.
Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup’s founding team. The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Clipto initially built its product for video creators managing scattered footage, but creators now make up only about one-quarter to one-third of its users; the rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, professors, and students. The company reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis, with just over 20 employees split across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), letting AI applications retrieve a user’s indexed files only within a scope the user authorizes and requests, with all processing running locally on the device rather than through the cloud. Clipto competes with larger platforms — Adobe offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos support natural-language search, though generally only within their own services; Clipto searches across video, audio, images, and documents, and lets users make selected files available to outside AI tools. The new funding will go toward AI models and computing infrastructure for consumer hardware, plus integrations with more AI agents.
Why it matters
Clipto is betting that cross-format, on-device search is a distinct product category rather than a feature Adobe, Apple, and Google will eventually absorb into their own ecosystems.