Clipto raises $15 million at $250 million valuation as product runs locally without cloud

Clipto closed an equity round of $15 million at a post-money valuation of $250 million. The round was led by HSG, formerly Skoya China, together with GL Ventures, InventionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Luo Zhang and 522 Ventures. The startup believes there is a market for a dedicated local file-search product rather than a feature embedded in existing applications, and it is betting on that premise while Adobe, Apple and Google are already integrating natural-language search into their offerings.

Founder Henry Kang has been tackling the problem for about two decades. As a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 he built robots that mapped environments, identified objects and remembered where to find them. His first startup used artificial intelligence to track clothing in wardrobes and suggest outfits; his second, ZenVideo, focused on simplifying video production and was acquired by Tencent in 2020. Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with part of his previous founding team, based on the insight that today there is an excess of content, most of it stored on local disks that few people access.

Clipto indexes video, audio, images, meeting recordings and documents directly on a user’s computer. Instead of browsing folders, users can search with free-form descriptions or ask ChatGPT, cloud services or other tools to locate a file. Two weeks ago the product added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that lets AI applications connect to external information sources; access to the indexed data requires an explicit request and user permission, and all processing runs locally without reliance on the cloud.

According to Kang, more than 30 million people have used the product since launch, and there are several hundred thousand paying subscribers, though he declined to disclose an exact figure or ARPU. The company reached an ARR of $15 million in early 2026 and is net-profitable, with a little over 20 employees spread across the Gulf region, Hong Kong and Singapore. An interesting data point: video creators, the original target audience, now account for only a quarter to a third of users. The remainder are lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, lecturers and students. Kang noted that a significant portion of customers remain subscribed for more than two years.

Adobe already offers AI-driven search in Premiere, Apple Photos and Google Photos enable natural-language search, but all are locked inside their respective ecosystems. Clipto searches simultaneously across video, audio, images and documents regardless of file location and also allows users to expose selected information to external AI tools. The open question is whether that will be enough to establish an independent category or whether the feature will eventually be absorbed into the products everyone already uses.