Clipto: The AI Helping You Find Lost Files Worth $250M
Clipto wants to be the search engine for files already on your computer, and it just raised $15M to prove there's a business in that.
Key points
- Clipto raised $15 million in an all-equity round, valuing it at $250 million.
- The tool indexes videos, audio, images and documents stored on your own device.
- More than 30 million people have used it, with hundreds of thousands paying subscribers.
- Clipto added Model Context Protocol support about two weeks before this report, letting AI tools access indexed files securely.
- The company hit $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and is profitable.
Our computers are filling up faster than we can sort them. Videos, recordings, documents: the pile grows, and the file you actually need is always the hardest one to find. Clipto, a San Francisco startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation, as TechCrunch first reported, to fix that.
What does Clipto do?
It indexes files already sitting on your machine, videos, audio, images and documents, so you can find them by describing what you remember rather than knowing which folder they live in. You can search directly inside Clipto, or ask an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude to pull the file for you. Nothing goes to the cloud unless you say so.
Founder Henry Kang has been at this for roughly two decades. Back in 2006, as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, he worked on robots that mapped their surroundings and remembered object locations. His first startup used the same logic for clothing: track what's in your wardrobe, suggest outfits. His second, ZenVideo, made video editing easier and was bought by Tencent in 2020, as Kang told TechCrunch. He started Clipto in 2023 with several colleagues from that previous team.
"The real insight is that in this AI era, we don't have a content shortage," Kang told TechCrunch. "The opposite is true."
Who is using Clipto?
Video creators were the first audience: people drowning in footage spread across drives. They now account for roughly a quarter to a third of users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, marketers, professors and students. Over 30 million people have used Clipto since launch; hundreds of thousands pay for it, and Kang said a notable share stay subscribed for more than two years.
How does Clipto stack up against the big players?
Adobe, Apple and Google all offer AI-powered search inside their own products. Clipto's argument is that those tools stay within their own walls. Clipto crosses file types and platforms, and it lets you feed selected results to external AI assistants. Whether that's enough to hold ground against companies with far more resources is the real question to watch. AI search is moving fast: we noted last month how Sentence Transformers v6.0 beat every off-the-shelf retrieval model on medical text on a single gaming GPU, which signals how quickly the underlying technology is improving for everyone.
The new funding goes toward better AI models, the computing infrastructure to run them on ordinary consumer hardware, and more integrations with AI agents.
Common questions
Is Clipto safe to use?
Processing runs locally on your device. Clipto does not use cloud services, and when an AI application requests access to your indexed files, it can only retrieve what you explicitly authorise.
How much does Clipto cost?
Clipto has a free tier. Advanced features require a paid subscription; exact pricing varies by plan.
What if I already use Google or Apple for search?
Clipto is designed for files those products don't cover. Its strength is cross-platform, multi-format search tied to AI tools you already use.
