Exa Labs Inc. has raised $250 million in a Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company at $2.2 billion.

The startup said it will use the new capital to train its next generation of models and expand infrastructure capable of handling "hundreds of thousands of searches per second," according to a company statement. 

Exa also said it is "assembling the best people around the world" to support that effort, citing recent hires including the former head of retrieval infrastructure at Meta, the head of search backend at Yandex, and a research team from Google.

LaunchDarkly president Marcus Holm is joining as chief revenue officer to lead global go-to-market operations. The hiring push and infrastructure expansion reflect Exa's view that AI-driven search demand will surge as more autonomous agents come online.

"Building a perfect search engine will be extremely hard. It's also necessary. Information is critical civilizational infrastructure for our new AI reality. Politics is fragmenting, wars are raging, and AI is accelerating — we need tools we can trust to understand what's going on. If we can build perfect search so that every AI has the highest quality information, then every human will too," CEO Will Bryk said. 

Exa's search tools are already used by companies including Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, and Monday.com, along with more than 400,000 developers, the company noted. 

Exa was founded five years ago to "build perfect search over all the world's information," but pivoted in early 2023 toward an API-first model for AI applications. Since then, it says usage has grown to more than 5,000 businesses.

The company argues that different AI agents require different retrieval behavior — from go-to-market tools that need broad coverage of people and organizations, to coding assistants that rely on precise results from repositories and technical documentation. It has tuned models for code-heavy queries and built systems aimed at reducing latency and downstream compute costs.

Exa also highlighted the scale of its infrastructure, saying its crawlers index more than 500 billion URLs and that it has developed its own vector database to support high query volumes. It argues that competitors built on top of existing search engines will struggle to match its combination of speed, cost efficiency, and retrieval quality.

Photo: Golden Dayz / Shutterstock