Investing in Exa to power real-time AI search

LLMs and AI systems are incredibly powerful, but they have a fundamental limitation: their knowledge is frozen at the point their training data was collected. To perform tasks that require current information, from checking stock prices to tracking developing news stories, they must access the live web in a safe and sound way.

The internet's primary search tools were not built for AI. Traditional search engines are designed for human interaction, prioritizing ad revenue and lists of blue links for people to click. Attempts to retrofit legacy search for AI might not deliver the clean, structured and verifiable data that AI agents need to function. This forces developers to build cumbersome and often unreliable data-gathering systems, and it leaves a vast amount of valuable information locked away in proprietary data ecosystems or scattered across the unstructured web.

As AI systems increasingly inform critical decisions based on high-quality information, enterprises will need access to a new kind of search provider, with different capabilities and incentives. That is why we are excited about our investment in Exa, an AI search infrastructure company that provides a search engine and web retrieval layer built specifically for LLMs and AI agents.

Exa, the search engine for AI

Unlike traditional keyword-based search, Exa based its architecture on natural language retrieval and embedding-based indexing. This allows it to understand complex queries and deliver fresh, token-dense, cited web context directly to an AI application via an API.

Exa's platform enables AI systems to:

• Access current data: Continuously crawls and indexes web content to provide the most current information available.
• Receive structured outputs: Delivers clean, token-dense information, rather than links and pages so that AI models can succeed in fewer tries, with fewer tokens.
• Access a data ecosystem: Builds answers from both the open web and private, commercial datasets licensed by Exa, allowing AI agents broader information in fields like law and finance.
• Leverage open-source models: Allowing enterprises to leverage open source LLMs securely, enabling increased flexibility and potential post savings.

Exa's platform enables AI systems to:

• Search API: A single endpoint for real-time retrieval. Instant and fast tiers return results fast enough for chatbots, voice assistants and coding copilots. A deep tier handles more challenging searches, capable of planning multi-step queries and returning reasoned, synthesized output.
• Agent APIs: An Exa agent that completes research tasks on its own. Agents can plan their work, execute and revise approaches and continue until they return a satisfactory answer.

A world-class team

Exa is led by a purpose-driven founding team with deep expertise in AI and search infrastructure. Their early conviction in this space, beginning in 2021, has given them a significant first-mover advantage.

Will Bryk, CEO, and Jeff Wang, co-founders of Exa, have been friends since their days studying computer science at Harvard, where they began building search engines in their free time. Exa is the result of their many years in pursuit of a more perfect search.

Why we're investing

Citi Ventures is thrilled to partner with Exa. This investment aligns perfectly with our long-standing thesis of backing foundational, API-first infrastructure companies that enable entire ecosystems, following our previous investments in Plaid for fintech and Deepgram for voice.

We believe the market for AI-native search is massive and it will become a ubiquitous layer in the AI stack. Exa's diverse and growing customer base, spanning AI coding, agent platforms, neolabs, professional services and GTM intelligence is a testament to the universal need for its platform.

Exa is trusted by customers that include Cursor, Cognition, OpenRouter, Vercel, Lovable, HubSpot and Clay. We are particularly excited about the immense potential for Exa to be used safely within financial services in areas like equity research, compliance (KYC/AML), investment banking and wealth management.

The team at Exa is poised to succeed in a competitive landscape, combining technical expertise and conviction to build a category-defining company. We are excited to watch Exa help power the future of AI search and the agentic economy.