capital · May 21, 2026

Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuation in round led by a16z

Exa Labs raises $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in a funding round led by a16z on May 20, 2026. The AI search engine for agents handles web retrieval in under 180 milliseconds and serves more than 400,000 developers at companies including Notion, Harvey and Clay. Exa Labs offers Exa Instant for sub-180ms queries, Contents for full webpage text and Exa Agent for multi-step workflows while using a custom vector database that queries billions of embeddings in 0.1 seconds with CPU cache optimization. Exa Labs CEO Will Bryk stated that most other search providers wrap other search engines and therefore cannot compete on quality, latency or cost.