The Idea:
In 2020, Will Bryk was an early engineer at customer service AI startup Cresta when OpenAI released GPT-3. He later described it as a magical tool that understood text at near-human level. Bryk saw something else in it: if a machine could understand a page, why was the world still finding things by keyword?
He knew who to call. Jeff Wang had been his roommate at Harvard, where he ran a GPU cluster in his dorm room, and had since spent three years building data and web infrastructure at Plaid. The pair had already tried building a crowdsourced search engine to take on Google, before realising language models offered a far more powerful approach.
In 2021, Bryk left Cresta and the old roommates got into Y Combinator with a new plan. Instead of matching keywords, they would train a search engine to predict the next link, the way GPT predicts the next word.
They thought they were building a better Google for people. They were actually building one for machines.
This was the beginning of Exa.
The Execution:
- August 2021: Still called Metaphor, the company released Wanderer 2, a language model trained to search the 2.5 million pages posted to Hacker News. A clever demo, not yet a business.
- November 10, 2022: Metaphor launched publicly as a search engine based on generative AI. Twenty days later, ChatGPT arrived.
- 2023: AI companies began asking for an API they could plug into their models, and Exa says it shipped the first web search API for AI that year. The consumer product took a back seat.
- January 2024: Metaphor renamed itself Exa, after 10 to the power of 18, a deliberately smaller number than the googol behind Google. The whole company was a seven-person team.
- July 2024: Lightspeed led a $17M Series A with Nvidia’s NVentures and YC, taking total funding to $22M. Bryk was 27, Wang 26.
- May 2025: Exa switched on a $5M cluster of 144 Nvidia H200s to train its own search models.
- September 2025: Benchmark led an $85M Series B at $700M, 10 times the previous valuation, with Twitter and Yelp backer Peter Fenton joining the board. Sacra put revenue at roughly $10M ARR, up 11x from about $880K a year earlier.
- May 2026: Andreessen Horowitz led a $250M Series C at $2.2B, more than tripling the valuation in eight months. By then over 5,000 companies including Cognition, OpenRouter and HubSpot were using Exa, with crawlers tracking 500 billion URLs.
- August 2026: Bryk said the index now serves 80 billion pages and tracks 1.4 trillion URLs, with Google scale targeted for early 2027.
- Today: Exa has passed $100M in annualised revenue after growing almost exactly 10x a year for three years. It now handles 2 billion requests a month from 200,000+ teams, and is betting agents will search 1,000x more than humans by 2030.
The lesson? Exa launched for curious humans in November 2022, and within months the loudest knocking came from AI companies wanting an API. Bryk and Wang kept the engine and swapped the customer, admitting they had been building for LLMs “this entire time”. Three years of 10x growth later, that switch is worth $100M a year. Google built search for the person typing. Exa built it for the thing doing the typing.