Clipto raises $15M at a $250M valuation for local media search

In short: Clipto, a three-year-old startup that helps people search their own videos and files, raised $15 million at a $250 million valuation.

What happened

Clipto, based in San Francisco with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, announced a $15 million funding round where investors bought company shares. The deal values Clipto at $250 million after the investment.

Clipto makes it easier to find things inside large collections of videos, audio, images, meeting recordings, and documents. It does this by “indexing” files, which means it creates a searchable map of what is inside them (like a book index that helps you jump to the right page). Users can type a description of what they want, or ask tools like ChatGPT or Claude to look for it.

The company says more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, and it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Clipto also says it reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue, meaning subscription revenue expected to repeat each year, at the start of 2026. Founder Henry Kang told TechCrunch the business is profitable on a net-income basis.

Clipto recently added support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which is a shared “plug” that lets AI apps connect to outside information sources. Kang said access to indexed files requires the user to ask and approve it, and that the work runs locally on the user’s device, not on cloud servers.

Why it matters

Many people and workplaces are drowning in stored files, especially video and meeting recordings. Tools like Clipto are trying to make old content useful again, but they are competing with built-in search features from Adobe, Apple, and Google.

Source: TechCrunch AI