Clipto raises $15 million for AI file search
The startup says its tool can search videos, audio, images, and documents on a device as it takes on larger platforms with similar features.
Clipto has raised $15 million in an all-equity round, giving the startup a post-money valuation of $250 million, as it pushes an AI tool built to search through users’ own files rather than generate new content. The company is betting that the flood of videos, recordings, images, and documents has created demand for a dedicated search product, not just another feature tucked inside existing apps. According to IT-PUB News, the round also underscores a broader AI race around helping people find and reuse the content they already have. That opportunity comes with a clear challenge: major platforms are already building similar capabilities into products people use every day.
Clipto wants to make personal files searchable
Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files stored on a user’s computer. Rather than forcing people to dig through folders, it lets them search by describing what they need or use AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude to help locate it.
The company says the idea is meant to address a basic problem: people are creating far more content than they can easily manage. Founder Henry Kang described it as content overload, not content scarcity, with large amounts of video footage sitting unused on computers.
Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup’s founding team. From the start, the company was built around the idea that AI should help people recover and reuse material they already have, instead of only producing something new.
Clipto moved beyond video creators
Clipto initially targeted video creators, especially users managing footage spread across computers and external drives. That is still a key use case, but Kang said creators now make up only about one-quarter to one-third of users.
Its broader audience now includes lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors, and students. That shift suggests the product is being used less as a niche media tool and more as a general way to find files.
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 did not provide a precise subscriber count or average revenue per customer, but said many customers remain subscribed for more than two years.
Clipto also said it reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and is profitable on a net-income basis. The company has just over 20 employees across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Bigger platforms already offer parts of the same idea
Clipto is trying to carve out room in a market where larger companies already control much of the software people use to store and search files. Adobe offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos let users find photos and videos with natural-language prompts.
Kang argues that Clipto’s advantage is breadth. He said the product can search across videos, audio, images, and documents, while Adobe, Apple, and Google generally focus on content inside their own services. Clipto also lets users make selected information available to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.
That is central to the company’s pitch. Instead of treating search as a feature tied to one app or one file type, Clipto is betting users will want a single place to organize material across formats and connect it to outside AI assistants.
Still, it is going up against products already embedded in widely used ecosystems. So the challenge is not only technical. Clipto also has to persuade people to adopt a separate tool for a problem bigger platforms are already addressing, at least in part.
Local processing and permissions are part of the pitch
Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, about two weeks ago. MCP is 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 retrieve only the information within the scope the user specifies. He also said the processing runs locally on the user’s device and does not require cloud services.
That matters because file-search tools can touch sensitive personal or professional information. Clipto is framing its model around user control, emphasizing that outside AI tools only see what the user allows them to see. For people handling legal, medical, or business material, that access management could be a significant part of the appeal.
At the same time, the product depends on linking indexed files to other AI systems. That makes permissions and integrations central to how Clipto works, not just a technical footnote.
The funding will go to models and integrations
The new round came from HSG, formerly Sequoia China, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. Clipto said the money will be used for the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run the service on consumer hardware, along with integrations with more AI agents.
That plan reflects where the company sits in the AI market. One side is focused on generating content; the other is focused on helping people search, organize, and reuse what they already have. Clipto is betting the second category is large enough to support a standalone business.
That remains an open question. The funding shows investors believe there is room for a company built around a very specific problem of modern computing: too much digital content, and not enough time to find it.
