Exa, founded in 2021 by William Bryk and Jeffrey Wang (originally as Metaphor Systems before rebranding), builds a search API designed specifically for AI agents and applications rather than human browsers, using neural embeddings-based search instead of traditional keyword matching to return results better suited for LLM consumption.
The bet on agent-native search paid off with investor attention: Exa raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, reflecting how much of the AI infrastructure market has shifted toward search built as a tool for models rather than a product for people.
Pricing runs on a free tier with limited monthly searches, then usage-based pricing per query for production traffic. For a developer building an AI agent that needs real-time web search as a callable tool rather than a scraped or stale dataset, Exa's agent-native search API addresses that directly.
