Clipto Hits $250M Valuation With AI-Powered Video Search

As generative AI creates more videos, recordings and other digital files, finding useful content is becoming a problem of its own. Clipto believes it has an answer: an AI-powered search tool that can scan huge amounts of content stored across a user’s devices.

The San Francisco-based startup has raised $15 million in an all-equity funding round at a $250 million post-money valuation. The round included HSG, formerly Sequoia China, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures.

Clipto’s technology is designed to help users find information buried across videos, audio files, images, meetings and other documents. Rather than manually opening folders and searching through files, users can describe what they want in natural language. They can also allow AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude to search their Clipto-indexed content.

The idea comes from founder Henry Kang’s nearly two decades of work with machines and digital information.

While pursuing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, Kang worked on robots that could record their surroundings, recognize objects and remember where those objects could be found. He later brought a similar concept to his first startup, which used AI to track clothing in a user’s closet and recommend outfits.

Kang’s second company, ZenVideo, focused on simplifying video creation and was acquired by Tencent in 2020, he told TechCrunch.

According to Kang, the rapid growth of generative AI has changed the biggest challenge facing digital creators. The problem is no longer a lack of content, but the huge amount of content people already have.

“We have too much content,” Kang said, pointing to the large amounts of unused video footage sitting on people’s computers.

Kang founded Clipto in 2023 alongside several members of his previous startup’s founding team. Instead of competing directly with companies focused on generating new content, Clipto chose to focus on helping people find and reuse the content they already own.

The company initially targeted video creators who had large amounts of footage spread across computers and external storage drives. That audience has since expanded significantly. Kang says creators now represent only around one-quarter to one-third of Clipto’s users.

The rest include professionals such as lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors and students.

Clipto says its products have been used by more than 30 million people since launch and that it now has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang did not disclose the exact subscriber number or average revenue per customer. However, he said a significant share of customers continue their subscriptions for more than two years.

The company reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable based on net income, according to Kang. Clipto currently employs just over 20 people across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The startup has also been expanding its connection with AI assistants.

Around two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that enables AI applications to connect with external information sources.

Kang said users must actively request and authorize access to their indexed files. AI applications can only retrieve information within the specific scope approved by the user. Clipto also says its processing happens locally on the user’s device rather than relying on cloud services.

That approach puts Clipto in competition with much larger technology companies. Adobe already provides AI-powered search inside Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos allow users to locate photos and videos using natural-language descriptions.

Clipto’s pitch is that it can search across videos, audio, images and documents in one place, rather than focusing primarily on content stored inside a particular company’s ecosystem. It also allows users to selectively expose information to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.

The latest funding will be used to improve the AI models and computing infrastructure required to run Clipto on consumer hardware. The company also plans to build integrations with more AI agents.

With digital content growing rapidly, Clipto is betting that the next big challenge for AI users won’t simply be creating more information — it will be finding the right information among everything they already have.

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