AI media search startup Clipto reaches $250M valuation
Three-year-old AI startup Clipto, which lets users search their video, audio and document files by describing what they need, has raised $15 million at a $250 million valuation. The company was founded by Henry Kang, whose previous startup ZenVideo was acquired by Tencent.
San Francisco-based startup Clipto, which also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has raised $15 million in an all-equity funding round, reaching a $250 million post-money valuation. Investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, and individual investors Hans Tung and Lu Zhang.
Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meeting recordings and other files stored on a user's computer, letting people search by describing what they're looking for instead of scrolling through folders. Users can also make selected files available to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.
Founder's background
Founder Henry Kang has worked on related problems for roughly two decades. As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings and remembered where objects were located. He later applied the concept to his first startup, focused on organizing clothing, before founding ZenVideo, a video-creation company that Tencent acquired in 2020. Kang founded Clipto in 2023 together with several members of ZenVideo's founding team.
Users and revenue
While Clipto initially targeted video creators, they now make up only about a quarter to a third of its user base, with the rest including lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, professors and students. More than 30 million people have used Clipto's products since launch, and the company has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and remains profitable. The company employs just over 20 people.
Clipto recently added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that lets AI applications access a user's indexed files only with explicit authorization, with all processing running locally on the user's device. The new funding will go toward AI models, computing infrastructure, and integrations with additional AI tools.
