As AI makes it easier to create media, the harder problem may be remembering what already exists. Clipto is building around that pressure point: using AI search to help people find video, audio, images, meetings and documents stored on their own computers.
Why Clipto is attracting investor attention
The San Francisco-headquartered startup has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. Its investors include HSG, formerly Sequoia China, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures.
Clipto also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong. The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, and it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.
Founder Henry Kang declined to share a more exact subscriber count or average revenue per customer. He did say a significant portion of customers remain subscribed for more than two years.
Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis, Kang said. The company has just over 20 employees across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The product is built for finding, not generating
Clipto indexes files already on a user’s computer. That includes videos, audio, images, meetings and other files, turning a local archive into something that can be searched with natural-language descriptions.
Instead of manually digging through folders, users can describe what they want to find. They can also ask ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools to locate relevant material for them.
That positions Clipto differently from many generative AI companies. Kang framed the opportunity around the amount of unused media people already have, rather than the creation of more material.
“The real insight is that in this AI era, we don’t have a content shortage,” Kang said. “The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used.”
Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of the founding team from his earlier startup. The company was built around the idea that AI could make existing content easier to retrieve and reuse.
From creators to broader professional use
Clipto began with video creators in mind. That original audience needed a way to manage footage spread across computers and external drives.
But Kang said creators now account for only about one-quarter to one-third of Clipto’s users. The rest of the customer base includes lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors and students.
That spread matters because the same basic problem appears in many fields. A lawyer, doctor, researcher or professor may not think of their work as media management, but they still need to locate recordings, documents, meetings or visual files without wasting time searching manually.
Clipto’s pitch is that AI search can sit above those personal archives. The product is less about organizing folders and more about making scattered material retrievable through plain-language requests.
How Kang’s earlier work shaped Clipto
Kang has worked on related problems for roughly two decades. While a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects and remembered where to find them.
He later applied the same basic idea to his first startup, which used AI to track clothing in a user’s closet and suggest outfits. His second company, ZenVideo, focused on simplifying video creation and was acquired by Tencent in 2020, Kang told TechCrunch.
Clipto follows the same broad pattern: capture information, understand what is inside it and make it easier to retrieve later. The difference is that the target is now the growing pile of files people already keep on their computers.
The competitive question for AI search
Clipto is moving into a market where major technology companies already control many of the tools people use to store and manage content. Adobe offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos let users search photos and videos using natural-language descriptions.
Kang’s argument is that Clipto can search across videos, audio, images and documents, while products from Adobe, Apple and Google generally focus on files stored within their own services. Clipto also lets users make selected information available to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard that allows AI applications to connect with outside sources of information. Kang said access to indexed files requires an active request and authorization from the user.
When an AI application accesses Clipto’s indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies. Kang added that all of this processing runs locally on the user’s device without requiring cloud services.
The new funding will go toward the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as integrations with more AI agents. The larger question is whether AI media search becomes a standalone software category or simply a standard feature inside tools people already use.