Clipto, a startup founded by Henry Kang in 2023, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation. Investors include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. The company indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files stored locally on a user’s computer, allowing search via natural-language descriptions or through AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. All processing runs locally without cloud services. Clipto recently added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling AI applications to access indexed files with user authorization and scope restrictions.

Initially built for video creators, Clipto‘s user base has expanded to include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, professors, and students. The company reports over 30 million users since launch and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Clipto reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the beginning of 2026 and remains profitable on a net-income basis. The company has just over 20 employees across San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Kang’s background spans two decades of related work: a PhD at Carnegie Mellon on robots that remembered object locations, a startup for AI-powered closet organization, and ZenVideo (acquired by Tencent in 2020). He founded Clipto with several former teammates, betting that helping users find existing content is more valuable than generating new material. Clipto competes with AI search features inside Adobe Premiere, Apple Photos, and Google Photos, but Kang argues Clipto‘s cross-platform local indexing and integration with external AI agents provide a distinct advantage. The new funding will go toward AI models and computing infrastructure for consumer hardware and more integrations with AI agents.