Exa AI

Exa is a search engine built for AI agents and applications, led by co-founder and chief executive Will Bryk. Exa describes itself as an applied AI research lab: it trains its own search and embedding models and runs its own crawling and indexing infrastructure across more than 500 billion webpages, with separate indexes of people, companies and scholarly works. Exa says more than 500,000 developers build on it, and its May 2026 funding announcement put the number of companies using it above 5,000 and named Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter and Monday.com as customers. Walden Yan, co-founder of Cognition, is quoted on Exa's site saying that Exa powers all parts of Devin. The platform is a set of APIs. Search returns web results with page text and highlights at a choice of latencies, and Deep Search runs multi-step searches with reasoning and structured outputs. The Contents API extracts clean text from any URL, including JavaScript-rendered pages and PDFs. The Agent API runs asynchronous research, list-building and enrichment tasks with structured outputs and citations, at effort levels up to Agent Ultra, launched in September 2026. Monitors run searches on a schedule and send updates by webhook, and Exa Connect pulls data from third-party providers such as Crunchbase, ZoomInfo and Similarweb through the same integration, billed on top of Agent usage. Exa publishes an official hosted MCP server at mcp.exa.ai/mcp that connects Claude, Cursor, Codex, VS Code and other MCP clients to its search, code search, content retrieval and research tools, and it can be tried without an API key at limited usage. Official Python and JavaScript SDKs, an OpenAPI specification and agent skills for coding agents are published on GitHub, and the integrations directory lists more than 50 frameworks and tools including OpenAI, the Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI and n8n. Pricing is pay as you go. New accounts get $10 in free credits every month plus a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding, with no payment method required and access to every endpoint. Instant Search costs $4 per 1,000 search requests, and per 1,000 requests Fast and Auto Search cost $7, Deep Search $12, Deep-Reasoning Search $15, Monitors $15 and Answer $5, with Contents at $1 per 1,000 pages. Agent runs cost from $0.012 to $1.00 at fixed effort levels, with the Ultra level billed by usage. The pay-as-you-go Developer plan includes SOC 2 Type II; Enterprise adds a custom MSA and DPA, zero data retention, HIPAA, SSO and SCIM, and custom rate limits. Startup and education grants offer up to $1,000 in credits. Exa is infrastructure for developers rather than a finished research product. Teams that want an answer engine for people to use directly can look at Perplexity AI, and teams that want conversational deep research without writing code can look at ChatGPT Deep Research or Gemini Deep Research. Developers comparing search APIs for agents can also look at Tavily and Brave Search API. Teams whose agents need SEO, enrichment, social and ads data from many providers through one key can look at treg.to, and teams that want cited answers from their own documentation rather than the open web can look at kapa.ai. Current state Q4 2026: Exa launched Agent Ultra, its highest-effort research mode, on 25 September 2026, and raised a $250 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation on 20 May 2026. G2 lists Exa with 1 review at 4.5 out of 5, and Product Hunt shows 17 reviews at 5.0.