«Klipto» Uses AI to Search Through Terabytes of Video, Valued at $250 Million

In an era where generative AI makes it easier than ever to produce vast amounts of content, a completely opposite problem emerges: how do we find what we need amid this enormous volume of videos, recordings, and files? The startup «Klipto» is betting that the solution lies in a standalone product capable of transforming these accumulated files into AI-searchable content, and it has succeeded in raising new funding that pushed its market valuation to $250 million.

New Funding and Prominent Investors

The company, headquartered in San Francisco with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, announced it had raised $15 million in a fully equity-based funding round, at a valuation of $250 million post-investment. The list of investors included several prominent funds, among them «HSG» (formerly known as Sequoia China), «GL Ventures», «EnvisionX Capital», and «Palm Drive Capital», in addition to individual investors.

How Does the Technology Work?

«Klipto» indexes videos, audio files, images, meetings, and other files stored on the user's device. Instead of browsing through folders in search of a specific file, the user can describe what they are looking for in natural language, or ask AI tools such as «ChatGPT» or «Claude» to find it on their behalf.

The company confirms that all processing takes place locally on the user's device without the need for cloud services, while requiring explicit permission from the user whenever any AI application accesses their indexed data.

A Two-Decade Journey

Behind the company stands its founder Henry Kang, who spent nearly twenty years tackling problems related to this field. In 2006, during his PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon University, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, recognized objects, and remembered their locations. He then applied the same concept in his first company, which used AI to track clothes inside a user's wardrobe and suggest outfit combinations. His second company, «ZenVideo», focused on simplifying video creation and was acquired by «Tencent» in 2020.

Kang sums up his vision by saying that the world today does not suffer from a shortage of content, but rather from a massive surplus of videos stored on devices without any actual use.

A Diverse User Base

«Klipto» was founded in 2023, and its product initially targeted video creators struggling to manage footage scattered across devices and external drives. But the user base expanded beyond this group, as content creators today make up only between a quarter and a third of users, while the rest include:

• Lawyers, doctors, and researchers
• Marketers and human resources specialists
• Professors and students

The company states that more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, and that it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, with a large proportion of them remaining subscribed for more than two years.

Positive Financial Figures

The company's annual recurring revenue reached $15 million by the start of 2026, while achieving net profits. The company operates with a team of more than twenty employees distributed across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It recently added support for the «Model Context Protocol», a standard that allows AI applications to connect to external information sources.

Competition with the Giants

«Klipto» enters a market dominated by major players such as «Adobe», which provides AI-powered search in its «Premiere» software, as well as «Apple Photos» and «Google Photos», both of which allow searching via natural language descriptions. However, Kang believes that his company's advantage lies in its ability to search across videos, audio, images, and documents together, whereas competitors' products focus only on files stored within their own services.

The company plans to direct the new funding toward developing AI models and the computing infrastructure needed to run its services on consumer devices, in addition to integrating more AI agents.

✦ بقلم فريق دروب أيديا