Clipto, a San Francisco–headquartered startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, raised $15 million in an all-equity financing round at a $250 million post-money valuation. Investors in the round include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures.
What the product does
The company provides software that indexes videos, audio, images, meetings and other files stored on a user’s computer, making them searchable. Instead of navigating folders, users can describe what they are looking for or ask AI agents such as ChatGPT or Claude to retrieve relevant files on their behalf.
Founder background and company origin
Founder Henry Kang has worked on related problems for roughly two decades. While a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, Kang worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects and remembered their locations. He later applied similar concepts at his first startup, which tracked clothes in users’ closets and suggested outfits. His second company, ZenVideo, aimed to simplify video creation and was acquired by Tencent in 2020.
Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup’s founding team, building the company around the observation that the challenge is not producing new content but finding and reusing existing material. “The real insight is that in this AI era, we don’t have a content shortage,” Kang said. “The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used.”
Users, revenue and product development
Clipto 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 provide a more precise subscriber count or average revenue per customer, but said a substantial portion of customers remain subscribed for more than two years.
The company reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis, Kang said. Clipto has just over 20 employees spread across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Technology and privacy
About two weeks before the announcement, Clipto added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that lets AI applications connect to external sources of information. Kang said access to indexed files requires the user’s active request and authorization: when an AI application accesses Clipto’s indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies. He also said processing runs locally on the user’s device without relying on cloud services.
Competitive landscape
Clipto is entering a market where larger companies already offer AI-enabled search capabilities. Adobe provides AI-powered search in Premiere; Apple Photos and Google Photos allow natural-language searches for photos and videos.
Kang argues Clipto’s differentiation comes from searching across videos, audio, images and documents together and from enabling selected data to be made available to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. The company is betting that combining those functions in a standalone product will give it a competitive position vs. the larger platforms.
Use of proceeds
According to Kang, the new funding will be used to develop the AI models and computing infrastructure required to run Clipto on consumer hardware and to build integrations with additional AI agents.
