Generative AI has made creating content easier than ever—but managing it has become a growing challenge. As videos, recordings, and documents pile up, major players like Adobe, Apple, and Google, along with a wave of startups, are turning to AI to make these files searchable. Whether this will evolve into a standalone software category or simply become a built-in feature of existing products remains an open question. Clipto, however, is betting that a dedicated solution has a place.

The San Francisco-based startup, with additional teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, has secured $15 million in an all-equity funding round, valuing the company at $250 million post-money. Backers include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. Clipto’s platform indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files stored on a user’s computer. Instead of digging through folders, users can describe what they’re looking for in natural language—or ask AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude to locate it on their behalf.

Founder Henry Kang has spent nearly two decades tackling related challenges. In 2006, while pursuing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, he worked on robots that recorded their surroundings, identified objects, and remembered where to find them. He later applied that same concept to his first startup, which used AI to catalog a user’s wardrobe and suggest outfits. “The real insight is that in this AI era, we don’t have a content shortage,” Kang explained. “The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used.”

Kang founded Clipto in 2023 alongside several members of his previous startup’s founding team, building the company around that very observation. While other AI companies focused on generating fresh material, Clipto set out to help users rediscover and repurpose what they already had. Initially, the product was designed for video creators managing footage scattered across computers and external drives. But Kang noted that creators now account for only about one-quarter to one-third of its user base. The rest includes lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, professors, and students.

The company reports that more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang declined to share a more exact subscriber figure or average revenue per customer, though he mentioned that a significant share of customers remain subscribed for over two years. Clipto hit $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026 and continues to be profitable on a net-income basis, according to Kang. The team consists of just over 20 employees split across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that enables AI applications to connect with external data sources. Kang emphasized that accessing indexed files requires the user’s active request and authorization. When an AI application taps into Clipto’s indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies. All processing runs locally on the user’s device, with no reliance on cloud services, Kang added.

Clipto is entering a market where larger companies already dominate much of the data and software people rely on. Adobe offers AI-powered search in Premiere, while Apple Photos and Google Photos let users find photos and videos using natural-language queries. Kang argues that Clipto stands out by searching across videos, audio, images, and documents, whereas products from Adobe, Apple, and Google generally focus on files within their own ecosystems. Clipto also allows users to share selected information with AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. The company is betting that bundling these capabilities into one product will help it compete against the big platforms. The fresh funding will support the AI models and computing infrastructure needed to run Clipto on consumer hardware, as well as deeper integrations with more AI agents, Kang said.