Clipto, a startup that makes the video and audio files on your computer searchable, has raised $15M in an all-equity round at a $250M post-money valuation. Investors include HSG, the former Sequoia China, along with GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, and angels Hans Tung and Lu Zhang.
The company indexes videos, recordings, images, and meeting notes stored locally, then lets users find anything by describing it in plain language, or by asking ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI assistant to retrieve it. Founder Henry Kang calls the pitch an answer to content overload: “We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn’t being used.”
Kang has worked on the problem for two decades, starting with robots at Carnegie Mellon that recorded their surroundings, and later building ZenVideo, a video creation startup Tencent acquired in 2020. He founded Clipto in 2023 with a small team split across San Francisco, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
The round leaves the startup competing with Adobe, Apple, and Google, all of which are adding AI search to their own media products, and betting that searchable content will become a standalone category rather than a feature of existing software.
