Exa is a search engine and API built specifically for AI applications, providing high-quality, relevant web content retrieval through neural search technology that understands meaning rather than just matching keywords. It solves the challenge of giving AI agents and LLM applications access to accurate, up-to-date web information by offering a search API optimized for machine consumption, with features like semantic search, content crawling, and structured output that are designed for programmatic use rather than human browsing. Exa has raised $85 million to build the search infrastructure that powers the next generation of AI agents and applications.
Exa 2.0 introduced three search modes: Exa Fast for sub-350ms responses as the fastest search API available, Exa Auto for high-quality default search with intelligent mode selection, and Exa Deep for agentic retrieval that produces the highest quality results through multi-step reasoning. The platform provides field-level grounding that links each piece of extracted information back to its source, structured outputs for clean data extraction, and an MCP server for direct integration with AI agents and coding assistants. Exa 2.1 further scaled pre-training and test-time compute by an order of magnitude, achieving frontier search API performance for both fast and agentic search modes.
Exa targets AI developers, agent builders, and companies building LLM-powered applications that need reliable web search capabilities, from RAG systems and research assistants to autonomous agents that need to find and synthesize information from the web. It integrates through REST APIs, Python and TypeScript SDKs, and MCP for direct agent integration, with support for content filtering, date-based search, domain restrictions, and custom relevance tuning. Exa is particularly valuable for AI applications where search quality directly impacts output quality, such as research agents, fact-checking systems, competitive intelligence tools, and any application where the AI needs to access current, accurate web information.
