When Will Bryk told his father in 2021 that he wanted to build a search engine, the response was incredulous. “What’s wrong with you? Have you heard of Google?” Bryk recalled in a recent interview. Yet four years later, the company he co-founded, Exa Labs, has raised an $85 million Series B round led by Benchmark at a $700 million valuation.
The financing marks a milestone for Exa, which has positioned itself as a new kind of search provider designed not for humans but for artificial intelligence systems that increasingly power applications across industries.
From Research Project to Infrastructure
Bryk, who studied physics and computer science at Harvard, started Exa with classmate Jeff Wang. The pair bought their own GPU cluster and spent more than a year experimenting with algorithms for web search. Their bet was that keyword-based indexing, the foundation of Google, would not be sufficient for AI agents that need to parse, structure, and process vast amounts of online information.
