Exa 3.0: search API upgrade aimed at AI agents
Exa launched Exa 3.0, calling it its biggest search-quality improvement, alongside a cheaper Exa Lite tier at $4 per 1,000 requests.
AI agents will search 1,000 times more than humans by 2030, Exa predicts. Exa is the search engine it's building for them. On October 13, it said it had passed $100 million in annualized revenue, after growing almost exactly 10x a year for three years. The company was founded in 2021 by Will Bryk and Jeff Wang, who met as freshmen at Harvard. Bryk is the CEO. They watched GPT-3 launch and saw a gap. The model understood natural language better than Google's keyword-based algorithms could, but search was still built on term frequency and link graphs. They started as Metaphor, a Y Combinator company, and renamed it Exa in 2024. Exa's argument is that agents don't search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world's data, not just the web. So Exa runs its own crawler and independent index instead of reselling someone else's results. It says it tracks more than 2 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages. It sells that as a search API. A coding agent can pull the right docs. A sales agent can enrich a list of companies. A model Exa trained picks out the most relevant excerpts from each page, which it says uses 95% fewer tokens than the full text. Customers include Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, and monday(.)com. Exa says it now handles 2 billion requests a month from more than 200,000 teams. On October 19, it launched Exa 3.0, which it calls its largest improvement to search quality. Exa says it ranks first on all eight benchmarks it tested against Perplexity, Brave, and Parallel, and first on the Artificial Analysis Search Index. Startup Fortune reports that independent tests show a narrower lead. A cheaper tier, Exa Lite, costs $4 per 1,000 requests. The index now includes more than a billion ecommerce listings and 211 million local businesses, added because personal AI assistants are driving usage. In May, Exa raised a $250 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Benchmark, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator participating. That was more than triple the $700 million valuation from its Series B eight months earlier. Bryk says customers increasingly see information as the bottleneck to agent performance.