Generative technology AI is making content creation faster, but it also makes material management more difficult. Faced with an ever-growing pile of videos, recordings, and documents, San Francisco-based startup Clipto has chosen to focus on retrieval rather than continuing with content generation. After its latest round of financing, the company’s post-investment valuation reached 250 million US dollars.
Clipto completed a $15 million equity financing round, with investors including HSG, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and also has teams in Singapore and Hong Kong.
From creators to a wider range of professional users
Clipto's product creates indexes for videos, audio, images, meeting records, and other files on users' computers. Users no longer need to search through folders layer by layer; they can directly describe the content they are looking for in natural language, or they can initiate searches using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools.
The company initially targeted video creators, helping them organize media files scattered across computers and external hard drives. However, creators now only represent a portion of its users. Clipto mentioned that current users also include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketing professionals, human resources practitioners, professors, and students.
Annual recurring revenue reaches 15 million US dollars.
Clipto was founded in 2023 by Henry Kang. Many members of the core team come from his previous entrepreneurial projects. Kang indicates that the company achieved annual recurring revenue of 15 million US dollars by the beginning of 2026 and continued to be profitable on a net profit basis.
- This round of financing amount: $15 million
- Post-investment valuation: $250 million
- Employee size: More than 20 people
Currently, Clipto has a total staff of just over 20 people, distributed across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The company believes that the issue in the AI era is not a lack of content, but rather that a large amount of material already in the hands of users is not being effectively utilized. Therefore, their product focus is on identifying and reusing existing content.
Add MCP to support and emphasize local processing.
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol ( MCP ). MCP is a standard that allows AI applications to connect to external information sources. According to the company, AI applications can only access the data indexed by Clipto after the user actively initiates a request and provides authorization, and the range of information that can be read is also defined by the user.
Kang also indicates that the relevant processing is completed locally on the user's device, without relying on cloud services. This is also one of the ways in which Clipto distinguishes itself from some platform-based products.
Competing with Adobe and Google for access
Clipto The market one enters is not blank. Adobe already provides a AI search function within Premiere. Apple Photos and Google Photos also support searching for photos and videos through natural language. In contrast, the selling point of Clipto is its ability to search across videos, audio, images, and documents uniformly, without being limited to data within a single platform.
The company also hopes to make this indexed information available for more AI assistants to utilize. Clipto plans to use the new financing mainly for model capabilities, computing infrastructure on consumer-grade hardware, as well as integration with more AI Agent.
