Exa Labs

Exa Labs was founded in 2021 by Will Bryk and Jeff Wang as Metaphor Systems, rebranding to Exa in 2024. The company operates a web search engine and API designed for retrieval by AI applications, with semantic search, configurable date and domain filters, and content extraction endpoints that return clean text and metadata rather than scraped HTML.

The product is used by developers building AI agents, research tools, and RAG pipelines that need structured web search results. Customers include AI startups and tools that incorporate web search into LLM workflows.

Exa Labs is headquartered in San Francisco and raised a $17M Series A in 2024 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, after a prior seed round from Y Combinator (S22), NVentures (NVIDIA), and others.