Clipto indexes videos, audio, images, meetings and other files on a user's computer, allowing them to search by describing what they are looking for, or to ask ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools to retrieve the information. The processing runs entirely locally on the user's device without requiring cloud services, according to founder Henry Kang.
Kang, who spent roughly two decades working on related problems, said his earlier work as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 involved robots that recorded surroundings and remembered where to find objects. He later applied that idea to a startup that used AI to track clothing and suggest outfits, and then co-founded ZenVideo, which focused on making video creation easier and was acquired by Tencent in 2020.
"The real insight is that in this AI era, we don't have a content shortage. The opposite is true. We have too much content. We have too much video footage sitting on our computers that isn't being used," Kang told TechCrunch.
Kang founded Clipto in 2023 with several members of his previous founding team, building the company around that observation. While many AI companies focused on generating new material, Clipto set out to help users find and reuse files they already had.
Initially built for video creators struggling to manage footage across multiple drives, the product has broadened. Kang said creators now account for only about one-quarter to one-third of its users. The rest include lawyers, doctors, researchers, marketers, human-resources professionals, professors and students.
The company says it has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Kang declined to provide a more precise subscriber count or average revenue per customer, though he said a significant portion of customers remain subscribed for more than two years. Clipto has just over 20 employees split among the San Francisco Bay Area, Hong Kong and Singapore.
About two weeks ago, Clipto added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows AI applications to connect with outside sources of information. Kang said access to indexed files requires the user's active request and authorization, and that when an AI application accesses Clipto's indexed data, it can only retrieve information within the scope the user specifies.
The startup's backers include HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang and 522 Ventures.
Clipto enters a market where larger companies already control much of the data and software people use to manage it. Adobe, Apple, Google and a growing number of startups are also using AI to make files searchable, though it is not yet clear whether this will support a new category of standalone software or become a standard feature of products people already use.