Clipto, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to make videos, audio, images, and documents searchable, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation, the company announced in August 2026.
The round was backed by HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. Founded in 2023, Clipto has just over 20 employees across San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Rather than generating new content, Clipto indexes files already stored on a user’s device, allowing them to search by describing what they’re looking for or by querying AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude. All processing runs locally on the user’s hardware without cloud services. The company recently added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that lets AI applications connect to outside data sources, with access requiring the user’s explicit authorization.
Clipto founder Henry Kang said the core idea stems from two decades of related work, including a PhD project at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 involving robots that identified and remembered objects, and a previous company, ZenVideo, acquired by Tencent in 2020. “The real insight is that in this AI era, we don’t have a content shortage,” Kang said. “We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used.”
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 start of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis. Kang noted that a significant portion of customers have stayed subscribed for more than two years.
While Clipto originally targeted video creators, that group now represents only about one-quarter to one-third of its user base. The remainder includes lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, and students. The new funding will go toward AI models, computing infrastructure for consumer hardware, and integrations with additional AI agents.
Clipto operates in a market that includes AI-powered search features from Adobe, Apple, and Google, though Kang argues those products are generally limited to files within their own ecosystems, whereas Clipto searches across multiple file types and platforms.
Source: TechCrunch