Generative AI makes it easier to create more content, but harder to track. As videos, recordings, and documents accumulate, Adobe, Apple, Google, and a growing number of startups are using AI to make those files searchable. It’s not yet clear whether it will support a new category of standalone software or become a standard feature of products that people are already using.
Clipto believes there is room to introduce other products. The San Francisco-headquartered startup, which also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a post-money valuation of $250 million. Investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures.
Clipto indexes video, audio, images, meetings, and other files on your computer. Instead of scrolling through folders to find what they need, users can search by describing what they’re looking for or ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to do the search for them.
Clipto founder Henry Kang has been working on related issues for nearly 20 years. Kang said that in 2006, when he was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, he was working on a robot that could record its surroundings, identify objects, and remember its location. Kang then applied the same basic idea to his first startup, using AI to track clothing in users’ closets and make outfit suggestions. Kang told TechCrunch that his second company, ZenVideo, focused on making video creation easier, was acquired by Tencent in 2020.
“The real insight is that in this age of AI, there is no shortage of content,” Kang says. “The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much unused video footage on our computers.”
Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup’s founding team, building the company based on that observation. While other AI companies focused on generating new material, Clipto set out to help users find and reuse files they already had.
Clipto originally built its product for video creators looking to manage footage scattered across computers and external drives. But Kang said creators currently only make up about a quarter to a third of users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human resources professionals, professors, and students.
According to the company, more than 30 million people have used its products since its launch, and the number of paying members is in the hundreds of thousands. Kang declined to provide more precise numbers of subscribers or average revenue per customer, but said a significant portion of customers have remained with the company for more than two years.
Clipto’s annual recurring revenue will reach $15 million at the beginning of 2026, and it remains profitable on a net income basis, Kang said. The company has more than 20 employees, split between the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong and Singapore.
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows AI applications to connect to external information sources. Kang said that access to indexed files requires active user request and approval. When an AI application accesses Clipto’s indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the range specified by the user. All of this processing is done locally on the user’s device, without the need for cloud services, Kang added.
Clipto is entering a market where large companies already manage a lot of the data and the software that people use to manage it. Adobe already offers AI-powered search in Premiere, and in Apple Photos and Google Photos, users can search for photos and videos using natural language descriptions.
Kang said Clipto can search across video, audio, images and documents, whereas products from Adobe, Apple and Google typically focus on files stored within their own services. Clipto allows users to make selected information available to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. The company believes that integrating these features into one product will help it compete with larger platforms.
Kang said the new funding will go toward the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as integration with more AI agents.
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