Clipto raises $15M at a $250M valuation to make terabytes of stored video searchable

The funding

Clipto, a startup building AI-powered search for files stored on people's own computers, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round that values the company at $250 million post-money, according to TechCrunch. The round includes HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, and runs on a headcount of just over 20 people.

What Clipto does

Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meeting recordings and other files sitting on a user's computer. Rather than digging through folders, users describe what they are looking for in plain language, or delegate the search to an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude.

Founder Henry Kang has spent roughly two decades on adjacent problems. As TechCrunch reports, he worked on robots that recorded and remembered their surroundings while a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, then built a startup that used AI to track the contents of a user's wardrobe and suggest outfits. His second company, ZenVideo, focused on simplifying video creation and was acquired by Tencent in 2020.

Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several colleagues from that earlier founding team. His framing, as he put it to TechCrunch, is that the AI era has produced not a shortage of content but a surplus — terabytes of footage sitting unused on hard drives. While much of the industry chased generation, Clipto went after retrieval and reuse.

From creators to professionals

The product initially targeted video creators juggling footage scattered across machines and external drives. That audience has shrunk to roughly one quarter to one third of the user base; Kang told TechCrunch the remainder includes lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR 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 give precise subscriber or per-customer revenue figures but said a significant share of customers stay subscribed for more than two years. Clipto hit $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis, according to Kang.

Privacy and agent access

About two weeks before the funding announcement, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), the emerging standard that lets AI applications connect to external information sources. Kang told TechCrunch that accessing indexed files requires the user's active request and authorization, that AI applications can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies, and that all processing runs locally on the device without cloud services.

The new funding is earmarked for the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to keep Clipto running on consumer hardware, plus integrations with additional AI agents.

The competitive question

Clipto is entering territory where incumbents already operate. Adobe offers AI-powered search inside Premiere, and both Apple Photos and Google Photos support finding photos and videos through natural-language descriptions.

Kang's counterargument, as reported by TechCrunch, is that those products largely search files stored within their own ecosystems, whereas Clipto works across video, audio, images and documents regardless of where they sit on a machine. Clipto also lets users expose selected information to tools like ChatGPT and Claude, a combination the company is betting will let it hold its own against larger platforms.

Why it matters

Generative AI has made content cheap to produce and expensive to keep track of, and Clipto's valuation suggests investors see retrieval as a real market rather than a feature. The open question TechCrunch raises is whether standalone search products can survive as Adobe, Apple and Google bake equivalent capabilities into software people already use. Clipto's answer — cross-format local indexing plus agent access with on-device processing — is a bet that privacy and interoperability will differentiate it from platform-native search. Its reported profitability on modest ARR makes it an unusually disciplined test of that thesis, but the outcome will shape whether AI-era content retrieval becomes its own category or simply another checkbox in existing apps.