Clipto, profitable at $15M ARR, raises $15M at a $250M valuation

Clipto, a three-year-old startup that uses AI to index and search the files people already have on their computers, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation.

The investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures.

The San Francisco-headquartered company, which also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files stored on a user's computer. Instead of scrolling through folders to find what they need, users can search by describing what they are looking for or ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to find it for them.

Clipto founder Henry Kang has been working 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 keep track of the clothes in a user's closet and suggest outfits. His second company, Zenvideo, focused on making video creation easier and was acquired by Tencent in 2020.

Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous startup's founding team, building the company around his observation about abundance rather than scarcity of content.

Clipto initially built its product for video creators trying to manage footage scattered across computers and external drives. But Kang said creators now make up only about one-quarter to one-third of its users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors, and students.

The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang declined to provide a more precise subscriber count or average revenue per customer, though he said 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 split among the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

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 the user's active request and authorization. When an AI application accesses Clipto's indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies, and all of that processing runs locally on the user's device without requiring cloud services, he added.