Generative AI is making content creation faster but making asset management more challenging. Faced with growing piles of videos, audio recordings, and documents, the San Francisco startup Clipto has chosen to focus on retrieval rather than continuing to generate content. Following its latest funding round, the company has a post-money valuation of $250 million.
Clipto has completed a $15 million fully diluted equity financing round, with investors including HSG, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with teams also based in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Expand from creators to a broader range of professional users
Clipto's product indexes videos, audio files, images, meeting transcripts, and other files on the user's computer. Users no longer need to navigate through folders layer by layer—they can simply describe what they're looking for in natural language or initiate searches using AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude.
The company initially focused primarily on video creators, helping them organize assets scattered across their computers and external hard drives. However, creators now make up only a portion of its user base. Clipto says its current users also include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, professors, and students.
Annual recurring revenue of $15 million
Clipto was founded in 2023 by Henry Kang, with several core team members coming from his previous startup ventures. Kang stated that the company achieved $15 million in annual recurring revenue by early 2026 and remained profitable on a net income basis.
- This round of funding: $15 million
- Post-investment valuation: $250 million
- Team size: Over 20 employees
Currently, Clipto has slightly more than 20 employees spread across the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The company believes that the challenge in the AI era is not a lack of content, but rather that users already have vast amounts of material that are not being effectively utilized; therefore, its product focuses on identifying and reusing existing content.
Added MCP support with emphasis on local processing
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that enables AI applications to connect to external data sources. According to the company, AI applications can only access data indexed by Clipto after the user actively initiates a request and grants authorization, and the scope of accessible information is determined by the user.
Kang also stated that the relevant processing is completed locally on the user’s device, without relying on cloud services. This is one of the ways Clipto differentiates itself from some platform-based products.
Competing with Adobe and Google for entry points
Clipto is not entering a blank market. Adobe already offers AI search functionality in Premiere, and Apple Photos and Google Photos support finding photos and videos through natural language. In comparison, Clipto’s unique selling point is its ability to unify searches across videos, audio, images, and documents—not limited to data within a single platform.
The company also aims to make these indexed insights available to a broader range of AI assistants. Clipto plans to use the new funding primarily to enhance model capabilities, build compute infrastructure for consumer-grade hardware, and integrate with more AI agents.