Clipto, a three-year-old startup that indexes videos, audio, images, and documents on a user's computer, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. The San Francisco-headquartered company, with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and says it is profitable on a net-income basis with just over 20 employees. HSG, formerly Sequoia China, led the round.
GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures also participated. Clipto says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Founder Henry Kang declined to share a precise subscriber count or average revenue per user, but said a significant portion of customers stay subscribed for more than two years — an unusually long retention window for a consumer AI product.
Clipto's pitch is that generative AI has inverted the content problem. Users are drowning in footage, meeting recordings, screenshots, and PDFs scattered across drives, and Clipto lets them search by describing what they want or by routing the query through ChatGPT or Claude. The product runs locally on the user's device and does not require cloud services, and access to indexed files requires the user's active request and authorization.
Key facts
- 01Clipto raised $15M in an all-equity round at a $250M post-money valuation, led by HSG (formerly Sequoia China).
- 02The three-year-old startup reached $15M in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and says it remains profitable on a net-income basis.
- 03More than 30 million people have used Clipto's products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.
- 04Roughly one-quarter to one-third of users are video creators; the rest are lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, and academics.
- 05Clipto added Model Context Protocol support two weeks ago, letting ChatGPT and Claude query indexed files locally on the user's device.
Kang has been circling this problem for roughly two decades. As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects, and remembered where to find them. His second company, ZenVideo, focused on video creation and was acquired by Tencent in 2020. Clipto, founded in 2023 with several members of that previous team, applied the same indexing instinct to the mess of files sitting on personal machines.
The product started aimed at video creators wrangling footage across external drives, but that user base has broadened sharply. Kang said creators now make up only about one-quarter to one-third of users, with the rest split across lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors, and students. That mix matters for pricing power: professional-services users are stickier and less price-sensitive than creators, which helps explain the retention numbers.
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol, the standard that lets AI applications connect to external data sources. Through MCP, a user can point ChatGPT or Claude at Clipto's local index and have the assistant retrieve information within a user-defined scope. This is where Clipto's positioning gets sharper — it is not just a search box but a permissioned bridge between local files and the frontier chatbots users already pay for.
The competitive picture is crowded at the top. Adobe already offers AI-powered search in Adobe Premiere, and Apple Photos and Google Photos let users find images with natural-language queries. Kang's counter is scope: those tools generally search only files stored within their own services, while Clipto spans video, audio, images, and documents across the whole machine. The new capital will go toward the AI models and compute needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, plus additional agent integrations.
The risk is obvious. Apple, Google, and Microsoft can all bundle cross-file AI search into the operating system, and each has telegraphed intent to do so. A $250 million valuation on $15 million in ARR is a roughly 16x multiple — reasonable for a profitable AI company growing quickly, but it assumes Clipto stays ahead of platform-level features that could arrive as free defaults. Kang has not disclosed growth rate or churn, so the durability of the ARR figure is harder to judge from the outside.
Clipto's bet is that a horizontal, local-first, permissioned search layer that plugs into any AI chatbot is a distinct product category, not a feature. The MCP move is the clearest signal of that thesis — rather than compete with ChatGPT and Claude for the user's attention, Clipto is trying to become the file-access substrate those assistants call into. If that framing holds, it is a defensible wedge; if the frontier labs ship comparable local connectors themselves, Clipto's window narrows quickly. The next twelve months of MCP adoption will decide which way that goes.
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