Clipto uses AI to search terabytes of video and is now valued at $250M
TechCrunch Kate Park
Clipto raised $15M at a $250M valuation to help people search their own videos and files with AI. It’s betting there’s room for a standalone tool, not just search inside Adobe, Apple, or Google.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Kate Park — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
AI is making it easy to create more stuff and harder to find any of it later. Clipto thinks that problem is big enough for its own product, and investors just backed that bet with $15 million in all-equity funding at a $250 million post-money valuation.
The San Francisco startup, with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, indexes videos, audio, images, meetings and other files sitting on a user’s computer. Rather than digging through folders, people can search in plain language or ask ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools to hunt for the right file. The company says the whole thing runs locally on the device, with no cloud processing needed.
Founder Henry Kang has been circling the same basic idea for years. He said he worked on robots at Carnegie Mellon in 2006 that recorded what they saw and remembered where things were. Later, he built a closet app that tracked clothes and suggested outfits, then ZenVideo, a video-creation company that Tencent acquired in 2020. Clipto, founded in 2023 with several people from that earlier team, is the latest version of that obsession: too much content, not too little.
That pitch has broadened beyond video creators. Creators still make up about one-quarter to one-third of users, Kang said, but lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human resources staff, professors and students use it too. Clipto says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. It reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and is still profitable on a net-income basis, according to Kang.
The new money comes from HSG, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures. Clipto is also adding support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, and plans to spend the fresh cash on AI models, computing infrastructure for consumer hardware, and more integrations with AI agents. The company is trying to do something the bigger platforms only partly do: search across different kinds of files, then let users expose selected information to outside AI tools when they want to.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right fight to pick. The giants are busy tucking search into their own products, which is fine until your life stops living neatly inside one app. A local-first tool that can rummage across everything and hand over only what the user approves feels less like a novelty and more like the shape of the next boringly useful software category.
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