Announced August 31, 2026, the three-year-old media-search startup raised $15M and now searches videos, audio, images, and files locally on your device — and can hand indexed results to ChatGPT or Claude over the Model Context Protocol.
2026-08-31 · by Moe Ameen
Published 2026-08-31 · Updated
Short answer
Clipto, a three-year-old AI media-search startup led by founder Henry Kang, raised $15 million at a $250 million post-money valuation, TechCrunch reported on August 31, 2026. Its software indexes the videos, audio, images and files on your device, searches them in plain language, and processes everything locally. Clipto reports more than $15 million in ARR and over 30 million users since launch.
Key takeaways
Clipto, an AI media-search startup, has raised $15 million in an all-equity round at a $250 million post-money valuation, TechCrunch reported on August 31, 2026. The San Francisco company — with additional teams in Singapore and Hong Kong and just over 20 employees — is roughly three years old and led by founder and CEO Henry Kang. Investors in the round include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, 522 Ventures, and angels Hans Tung and Lu Zhang.
What Clipto does is index the media already sitting on your computer — videos, audio, images, meetings, and other files — and let you search it in natural language. You describe the moment you're looking for and it retrieves the file or the clip. It recently added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude can query that index and pull selected results into a chat, though the company says access requires the user's active request and authorization each time.
The differentiator Clipto leans on is that all of this processing runs locally on the user's device rather than in the cloud — a privacy stance that matters when the corpus is your own raw footage, recorded calls, and personal photos. The company reports more than $15 million in annual recurring revenue, says it remains profitable on a net-income basis, and states that more than 30 million people have used its products since launch, with hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.
The important scope note for creators: Clipto is a retrieval layer, not a production or publishing tool. It finds the moment in your archive. It does not cut it into a short, caption it, brand it, or post it — turning a located clip into finished content that ships is a separate job.
Clipto answers "where is that moment in my footage?" It's a memory layer for your own archive, and a good one — you describe the clip and it hands you the file. What it deliberately doesn't do is anything after retrieval: no cutting, no captions, no branding, no posting. That's the exact seam Kompozy is built to pick up, and the pairing is clean because the two tools never overlap. Use Clipto to locate the golden 90 seconds buried in a two-hour livestream or an old webinar recording; then drop that long-form clip into Kompozy and let Clipped Shorts cut it into vertical shorts, burn in branded captions, and reframe it to 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 — the production step Clipto's search leaves untouched.
From there Kompozy expands one found moment into a week of content. A single retrieved clip becomes the raw material for Persona Shorts and HeyGen avatar video that reframe the take on camera, a brand-exact Carousel, Quote Graphics, a Blog Article, and an Email Newsletter — every piece written in your voice under the Persona Brief so a batch mined from old footage still reads as one brand. Then Autopilot schedules and publishes it across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. Clipto turns your archive into a searchable library; Kompozy turns what you pull from that library into finished, on-brand posts that actually ship — retrieval and production, doing separate halves of the same job.
A listicle video made in Kompozy, one of the finished formats a clip or idea you dug out of your archive can become. Clipto had no part in it.
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Clipto is an on-device AI media-search startup that indexes videos, audio, images, meetings, and files on your computer and lets you search them in natural language. On August 31, 2026 it announced a $15M all-equity round at a $250M post-money valuation, led by founder and CEO Henry Kang, with all processing running locally on the device.
No. Clipto is a retrieval and search tool — it finds the moment in your archive and can hand results to AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude over the Model Context Protocol. It does not cut clips, add captions, brand content, or publish to social platforms. Turning a located clip into a finished, published post is a separate job.
Clipto states that its indexing and search run locally on the user's device rather than in the cloud, so your footage, recorded calls, and photos stay on the machine. When an AI tool queries the index via MCP, the company says access requires the user's active request and authorization each time.
Use Clipto to locate the exact moment in your footage, then feed that clip into a generation-and-publishing engine like Kompozy. Kompozy cuts it into captioned vertical shorts, reframes it per platform, and fans it into avatar video, carousels, images, a blog, and a newsletter in your Persona Brief voice — then schedules and publishes across the eight social platforms plus blog and email.
We checked every figure, date and quote on this page against the sources listed below on 2026-10-23, and removed or rewrote claims we could not confirm. Kompozy plan and format details come from kompozy.io/pricing.
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