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Generative AI is making it easier to produce more content and harder to keep track of it. As videos, recordings, and documents accumulate, Adobe, Apple, Google, and a growing number of startups are using AI to make those files searchable. It is not yet clear whether that will support a new category of stand-alone software or become a standard feature of products people already use. Clipto is betting there is room for a separate product. The San Francisco-headquartered startup, which also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. The 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 on a user’s computer. Instead of scrolling through folders to find what you need, users can search by describing what they’re looking for or ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to find it for them. Clipto founder Henry Kang has been working on related problems for roughly two decades. Kang said that, while 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. Kang later applied the same basic idea to his first startup, which used AI to keep track of the clothes in a user’s closet and suggest outfits. His second company, Zenvideo, focused on making video creation easier and was acquired by Tencent in 2020, Kang told TechCrunch. “The real insight is that in this AI era, we don’t have a content shortage,” Kang said. “The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used.” Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup’s founding team, building the company around that observation. While other AI companies focused on generating new material, Clipto set out to help users find and reuse files they already had. Clipto initially built its product for video creators trying to manage footage scattered across computers and external drives. But Kang said creators now make up only about one-quarter to one-third of its users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors and students. The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang declined to provide a more precise subscriber count or average revenue per customer, though he said a significant portion of customers remain subscribed for more than two years. Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026, and remains profitable on a net-income basis, Kang said. The company has just over 20 employees split among the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore. About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard that allows AI applications to connect with outside sources of information. Kang said access to indexed files requires the user’s active request and authorization. When an AI application accesses Clipto’s indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies. All of this processing runs locally on the user’s device without requiring cloud services, Kang added. Clipto is entering a market where larger companies already control much of the data and software people use to manage it. Adobe already offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos allow users to find photos and videos using natural-language descriptions. Kang said Clipto can search across videos, audio, images, and documents, while products from Adobe, Apple, and Google generally focus on files stored within their own services. Clipto also lets users make selected information available to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. The company is betting that combining those functions in one product will help it compete with larger platforms. The new funding will go toward the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as integrations with more AI agents, Kang said.
document fetched 2026-09-01 02:49 · canonical https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/three-year-old-ai-media-search-startup-clipto-hits-a-250m-valuation