AI video search startup Clipto raises $15M at a $250M valuation

Generative AI is making it easier to produce content and harder to keep track of it. As videos, recordings, and documents pile up, Adobe, Apple, Google, and a growing number of startups are using AI to make those files searchable — and Clipto is betting that capability can support a standalone product.

The San Francisco-headquartered startup has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation, with investors including HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures.

Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files on a user's computer. Instead of scrolling through folders, users describe what they are looking for, or ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to find it for them.

Founder Henry Kang has worked on related problems for roughly two decades: as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon in 2006 he built robots that recorded their surroundings and remembered where objects were, and his second startup ZenVideo, which simplified video creation, was acquired by Tencent in 2020.

Clipto initially built for video creators managing footage across computers and external drives; creators now make up only about a quarter to a third of users, with lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, professors, and students making up the rest. The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.

Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis, with just over 20 employees split between the Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for the Model Context Protocol, letting AI applications connect to its indexed data. Access requires the user's active request and authorization, and all processing runs locally on the user's device without cloud services.

Adobe already offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos allow natural-language lookup — but Kang argues Clipto searches across video, audio, images, and documents, while the larger platforms generally focus on files inside their own services.

The new funding will go toward the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, plus integrations with more AI agents. The bet is that combining cross-file search, local processing, and agent access gives Clipto a category of its own.