Clipto, a Palo Alto-based startup founded in 2023 by Henry Kang, raised 15 million dollars in an all-equity round at a 250 million dollar post-money valuation, the company told TechCrunch on August 31. Clipto says it reached 15 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and net-income profitability before taking the outside capital, implying a roughly 17-times revenue multiple on the new valuation. Investors include HSG, formerly Sequoia China, alongside GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, and individual investors Hans Tung and Lu Zhang.
The product's core distinction is that it indexes and searches video, audio, images, and documents entirely on a user's own device rather than in the cloud, letting people or authorized AI agents query a private media archive in natural language, for a specific moment, face, or spoken line, without uploading the underlying files anywhere. The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with content creators making up roughly a quarter to a third of users alongside lawyers, doctors, researchers, and marketers who value the privacy and compliance benefits of local processing over marginal gains in cloud-based model accuracy.
Alongside the funding, Clipto is launching Windows and Android apps and an MCP integration that lets AI agents like Claude or ChatGPT search a user's private video library directly. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its on-device AI models and computing infrastructure. Clipto's bet is that an independent, cross-file local search product can hold its ground against Adobe, Apple, Google, and the search tools those companies build directly into their own operating systems.
