Clipto secures $15M to expand local AI search across files
Clipto raises $15M at a $250M post-money valuation
Clipto, a San Francisco-headquartered startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has raised $15 million in an all-equity financing round at a $250 million post-money valuation. The company indexes videos, audio, images, meetings and other files on a user’s computer, allowing people to locate material through descriptions rather than folder-by-folder searching.
The investor group includes HSG, formerly Sequoia China, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures. Founder Henry Kang said Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis.
Clipto says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang did not provide a precise subscriber total or average revenue per customer, but said a significant share of customers stay subscribed for more than two years. The company has just over 20 employees across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Search across local media and documents
Founded in 2023 by Kang and several members of his prior startup’s founding team, Clipto initially targeted video creators managing footage distributed across computers and external drives. Creators now account for roughly one-quarter to one-third of users, Kang said. Its wider user base includes lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors and students.
The product is designed around the problem of accumulated material rather than content generation. It can index and search across video, audio, images and documents, and users can ask AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude to locate information within the indexed files. Kang said Clipto supports access only when a user actively requests and authorizes it, with retrieval restricted to the scope the user specifies.
About two weeks before the announcement, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard that lets AI applications connect to external information sources. Kang said the relevant processing runs locally on the user’s device and does not require cloud services.
Competition and use of the new capital
Clipto enters a market in which larger platforms already offer AI-assisted search. Adobe provides AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos support natural-language searches for images and video. Kang’s position is that those products generally concentrate on content inside their own services, whereas Clipto searches across different local file types and can expose selected material to AI tools.
The new capital will fund AI models and computing infrastructure needed to operate on consumer hardware, as well as integrations with additional AI agents. For businesses, the practical implication is to evaluate how fragmented local archives can be indexed, permissioned and reused while keeping access limited to the material a user has expressly authorized.