Exa raises $17M from Lightspeed, Nvidia, Y Combinator to build a Google for AIs
Summary
And they cant just type their requests on their keyboards.Exa is building a tool that allows AI models to perform something like a web search, but with an AI-native twist.The co-founders bought a million dollars worth of GPUs (which were easier to get in those days) and, using a vector database and embeddings (not a classic transformer-based LLM), they began to build a machine learning model trained to natively understand links rather than words and sentences.Transformers normally predict the next word. "So just as an LLM would complete a sentence by furnishing the most probable next word, Exas system does so with the most probable link (or 10), but presumably minus the SEO spam and (ironically) AI-generated chum clogging every ordinary search engine these days.On Monday the startup announced it raised a new $17 million Series A led by Lightspeeds Guru Chahal, with participation from Nvidias venture arm NVentures and Y Combinator, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Wang said.After ChatGPT stormed the tech world, AI companies began asking Exa for an API version of their search engine that they could plug into their models. Exa is located in San Francisco, part of the cozy Cerebral Valley AI startup set. In fact, as TechCrunch previously reported, a tweet by Wang went viral when he was looking for other companies that wanted to go in on an order of office nap pods and the response was overwhelming.