Insider Brief
- Clipto raised $15 million at a $250 million post-money valuation from investors including HSG, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, and Palm Drive Capital, and launched native Windows and Android apps along with a new Model Context Protocol for AI agents.
- The startup uses on-device AI to turn personal video and audio into a searchable memory layer, offering semantic search, transcription, summaries, and integrations with tools like Adobe Premiere, without uploading files to the cloud.
- Used by more than 30 million people including professionals at Google, Apple, and Meta, Clipto positions itself as building a privacy-first AI memory layer that lets both people and AI agents search personal media while keeping data local.
PRESS RELEASE — Clipto, a startup building the AI video memory layer, announced $15 million in funding at a $250 million post money valuation from leading global investors including HSG (fmr. Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures. The company also announced the launch of its native Windows and Android apps, along with a new Model Context Protocol (MCP) that allows AI agents to securely search users’ private media libraries.
The Problem: The High-Cost, Low-Privacy Black Box of Video Search
AI has made creating videos dramatically easier. Finding information buried inside years of personal footage remains surprisingly difficult. People are capturing more video than ever before, creating terabytes of unstructured, unsearchable media sitting stagnant on their devices. Traditional video search relies on archaic workflows: manually scrubbing through timelines, decoding cryptic file names, or spending hours tagging clips manually. Most AI tools require uploading media to the cloud, creating privacy concerns, bandwidth bottlenecks, higher costs, and slower workflows. Current tools treat video libraries as isolated files rather than searchable knowledge, leaving years of valuable footage effectively inaccessible, both to people and increasingly to AI systems. It sits buried, unreachable, and entirely locked out of the modern AI ecosystem. Clipto is used by more than 30 million people worldwide, including professionals at Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, McKinsey, and other leading organizations.
“I shoot a huge volume of footage every day. The hardest part was never shooting, it was digging through hard drives to find one specific moment,” said Alex Grubb, a restaurant photographer in the UK. “Clipto tags everything automatically, so I just type a keyword and jump straight to the shot, down to the exact timecode. It turned my messy archive into a searchable library. What used to take me hours now takes seconds.”
Clipto’s Solution: Fully Local AI Memory Layer for Video
Clipto transforms raw video and audio into a searchable memory layer that AI can understand. Using proprietary on-device AI, Clipto indexes media without ever sending files to the cloud. It combines video understanding, semantic search, transcription, summaries, and structured video notes to turn years of disconnected footage into a private AI memory platform.
Key features include:
- Semantic Video & Audio Search: Instantly search across terabytes of video and audio using natural language.
- Deep Integrations: Use Clipto within Adobe Premiere and other video editing applications to save hours on video search.
- Universally Available: Clipto is already currently available via Web, Mac, and iOS, with Windows and Android applications today.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support: New MCP allows AI agents to query video libraries to dramatically speed up search and analysis.
- Privacy First: Users can choose to have all search on-device to ensure total privacy.
“Generative AI has transformed how content is created, but it still struggles to understand the enormous amount of personal media people already have,” said Henry Kang, Founder and CEO of Clipto. “We believe AI needs a memory layer, not just a reasoning layer. Video is where that challenge is most visible today, but the broader opportunity is helping AI understand the information people have accumulated over years of work. This funding helps us build the infrastructure that allows people and AI agents to instantly search, understand, and work with their own private media, without giving up control of their data.”
“We believe AI’s next frontier isn’t just generating more content, it’s making sense of the enormous amount of content people already have,” said Holly Zheng, Founding Partner at EnvisionX Capital. “Clipto is tackling one of the hardest problems in AI: turning years of unstructured video into AI-readable memory while keeping data private and on-device. Henry and his team have the rare combination of deep technical expertise and product execution to build a category-defining company.”
Learn more or download Clipto today at: https://www.clipto.com
About Clipto
Founded in 2023, Clipto builds privacy-first AI memory infrastructure for personal media. Its platform enables creators, professionals, and enterprises to organize, search, and understand massive collections of video, audio, and other unstructured content, giving both people and AI agents secure access to their own private memory. Learn more at https://www.clipto.com.
