Generative AI has made it easier to create content than ever before. But this abundance creates a new problem: finding what you need when files are scattered everywhere. An AI video search tool called Clipto has emerged to solve this challenge, and the market is taking notice.
Clipto, an AI video search tool, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. The San Francisco-headquartered startup, which also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, is betting there is room for a standalone product in a space dominated by tech giants.
How This AI Video Search Tool Works
Instead of scrolling through endless folders, users describe what they are looking for. The AI video search tool then finds relevant files instantly. Users can also ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI assistants to retrieve information on their behalf.
Clipto indexes everything on a user’s computer, including videos, audio recordings, images, meeting recordings, and documents. Processing happens locally on the user’s device without requiring cloud services, addressing privacy concerns while keeping operations fast and efficient.
Impressive Growth and User Adoption
More than 30 million people have used Clipto’s products since launch. The company has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, with a significant portion remaining subscribed for over two years.
At the beginning of 2026, Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue. The company remains profitable on a net-income basis, an achievement for a relatively young AI startup. Clipto operates with just over 20 employees split across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Founded on Two Decades of Experience
Clipto founder Henry Kang has been working on related problems for nearly 20 years. As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, Kang worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects, and remembered where to find them. He later applied this same concept to his first startup, which used AI to organize 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 founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup’s founding team. While many AI companies focused on generating new content, Clipto set out to help users find and reuse files they already had.
“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.”
Users Beyond Video Creators
The AI video search tool originally targeted video creators managing footage across multiple computers and external drives. Today, creators make up only about one-quarter to one-third of Clipto’s users.
The platform now serves diverse professionals including lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors, and students. This expansion demonstrates the universal need for efficient file search across industries.
Standing Out from the Competition
Clipto enters a market where larger companies control much of the data and software people already use. Adobe Premiere offers AI search within its ecosystem. Apple Photos and Google Photos allow natural-language searches for media.
However, Kang notes that products from Adobe, Apple, and Google generally focus on files stored within their own services. The AI video search tool from Clipto works across videos, audio, images, and documents regardless of where they are stored. Clipto also lets users make selected information available to AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, creating a bridge between personal file archives and powerful AI assistants.
Recent Developments and Future Plans
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP). This standard allows AI applications to connect with outside sources of information. 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.
The new funding will go toward AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as integrations with more AI agents. The investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures.
The Future of AI File Search
The rise of generative AI has created more content than anyone can manage effectively. Whether standalone products like Clipto or integrated features from tech giants will dominate remains uncertain. However, Clipto’s impressive growth suggests there is strong demand for dedicated solutions.
With its valuation reaching $250 million, profitability achieved, and millions of users onboard, Clipto has established itself as a significant player. As AI agents become more common, the need for tools that can efficiently retrieve information from personal archives will only grow. This AI video search tool is building the infrastructure to make that possible.
