Clipto's AI video search valued at USD 250M after...

Henry Kang has spent nearly 20 years trying to solve the same problem from different angles: how do you find one thing buried inside an ocean of files. His latest attempt, a San Francisco startup called Clipto, just raised $15 million in an all-equity round that values the company at $250 million post-money. The backers include HSG, formerly known as Sequoia China, along with GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, and individual investors Hans Tung and Lu Zhang, plus 522 Ventures.

Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files sitting on a user's computer, then lets people search by describing what they want rather than digging through folders. It also plugs into tools like ChatGPT and Claude, so users can ask an AI assistant to track something down instead of doing it themselves.

The bet is that this becomes its own category of software rather than a feature bolted onto products people already use, a question Adobe, Apple, and Google are also circling as generative AI floods the world with more content than anyone can sort through by hand. Kang's path to Clipto runs through a PhD at Carnegie Mellon and two earlier startups.