Exa Blog · Jun 2026
Product launch for Exa Agent, positioned as frontier web research with strong price/performance and integrated with Exa’s search stack for agents.
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Aug 2, 2026
Exa (formerly Metaphor) is a San Francisco applied-AI research lab building web search and data infrastructure for AI agents. It crawls and indexes the web, trains neural retrieval models, and exposes search, crawling, contents, monitoring, and research-agent capabilities through APIs and products.
Primary product
Exa Search: an AI-native web search API for agents and applications, complemented by Contents, Websets/Deep research, Monitors, and Exa Agent.
Founded
2021
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
75-100 (public signals range from YC's 75 to LinkedIn's 97; time-sensitive)
Work style
Onsite
Industry
Software Development
Sub-industry
AI search, web data infrastructure, retrieval and developer APIs
Offices
Business model
Leadership
Co-founder and CEO
Co-founder
Chief Revenue Officer
Head of Engineering
Founders
Co-Founder
Investors
The company describes itself as a worldwide team of builders, engineers and researchers working on technically difficult web-scale search. Public recruiting signals emphasize in-person collaboration, ML reading groups, lunch talks and high ownership.
Work style
Onsite
Visa sponsorship
Yes
Compensation
Public job postings and recruiting materials indicate competitive startup compensation, but no reliable company-wide salary or equity bands were found in the reviewed sources. Benefits and visa sponsorship are explicitly documented.
Benefits
Pricing
Usage-based pay-as-you-go: public pricing lists Search at $7 per 1,000 requests, Contents at $1 per 1,000 pages, Answer at $5 per 1,000 requests, Monitors at $15 per 1,000 requests, and Agent at approximately $0.012-$1.00 per run depending on effort; enterprise pricing is customized.
Differentiators
Technology
Customers
Competitors
Estimated revenue
Approximately $10M-$12M annualized revenue/ARR as of late 2025, based on third-party estimates; not company-reported and should be treated as directional.
Estimated monthly visits
465.7K
Exa Blog · Jun 2026
Product launch for Exa Agent, positioned as frontier web research with strong price/performance and integrated with Exa’s search stack for agents.
Bloomberg · May 2026
Independent coverage of the Series C and valuation, describing Exa's positioning against established web search.
Exa Blog · May 2026
Exa announced a $250M Series C led by a16z at a $2.2B valuation, citing more than 5,000 companies using the platform and plans to scale models, infrastructure and go-to-market.
Exa Blog · Sep 2025
Exa announced an $85M Series B led by Benchmark at a $700M valuation; Peter Fenton joined the board.
Exa Research Blog · Mar 2025
Technical explanation of Exa's crawler, embedding-based retrieval, custom vector database, Search API and Websets architecture.