Startup Clipto has raised $15 million in an all-equity funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $250 million, according to TechCrunch, which cited the company. Clipto, founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, says it reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remained profitable on a net-income basis before completing the round.
The round included HSG, formerly known as Sequoia China, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, and Palm Drive Capital, along with Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. The company has just over 20 employees distributed across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
A Search Engine for Accumulated Files
Clipto indexes video, audio, image, recording, meeting, and other files stored on a user’s device. Instead of manually searching through folders, users can describe the content they want in natural language, and they can also ask tools such as ChatGPT and Claude for help locating specific files.
The company initially targeted video creators who keep their footage on multiple devices and external storage drives, but it says this group now represents only about one-quarter to one-third of users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors, and students.
Clipto says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. However, founder Henry Kang did not disclose the exact number of subscribers or average revenue per customer, noting that a significant share of customers continue subscribing for more than two years.
What Distinguishes the Technical Approach?
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard that allows artificial-intelligence applications to connect to external information sources. According to Kang, the application cannot access indexed files until the user requests and approves it, and the retrieval scope remains limited to the information specified by the user.
The company says processing takes place locally on the user’s device and does not require cloud services. It plans to use the funding to develop the models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer devices, in addition to building integrations with more AI agents.
Why Does This Matter?
Clipto is betting that the growth of content production will create a standalone market for tools that find and reuse files, rather than relying solely on tools that generate new content. But this bet faces direct competition from platforms that already own the data and software customers use; Adobe provides AI-powered search within Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos enable natural-language search within their services.
Clipto’s proposed advantage is bringing multiple types of files together in one product and then making selected information available to agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. Still, the model’s defensibility against features built into larger products remains an open question, and the user and revenue figures announced by the company were not supported by complete details about the number of subscribers or their average spending.