$100M/year Google for AI agents
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: AI agents repeatedly searching the web as they code, research prospects & complete everyday tasks are multiplying demand for Exa, which reached a Sacra-estimated $100M in annualized revenue in September 2026, up 10x year-over-year. For more, check out our updated report and dataset on Exa.
We interviewed Exa CEO & co-founder Will Bryk in September 2024 about turning the web into a searchable database for AI applications, when the company was at ~$1M in annualized revenue. We then followed up in January 2026 at ~$10M as coding tools were driving adoption & multi-step agents looked poised to drive the next stage of growth.
Key points via Sacra AI:
- Exa's monthly search volume roughly doubled from ~1B in April to 2B in October 2026 with the explosive growth of agents doing inference-time reasoning, writing & coding and repeatedly searching the web for new information as they work through multi-step tasks, helping drive annualized revenue to a Sacra-estimated $100M in September, up from $14M at the end of 2025 & $10M a year earlier.
- Go-to-market has emerged as the next big use case for Exa, with its search API powering customer-facing prospecting & enrichment agents at HubSpot, Monday.com & 11x that let users build lead lists from natural-language queries like “VPs of RevOps at Series B SaaS companies that recently hired a CRO,” automating in one shot what takes multiple steps in tools like Apollo.
- Demand for agentic search is driving fierce competition & falling prices, with Parallel ($230M raised, Kleiner Perkins) launching Turbo at $1 per 1,000 requests in July 2026 and Perplexity ($750M annualized revenue in August 2026) making a renewed push for developers with $1 Fast Search (September 2026) after previously letting its API take a back seat to its consumer assistant, undercutting Exa ($4, Lite plan launched October 2026), Tavily ($5, acquired by Nebius), You.com ($5, $90M ARR in 2025, up 350% YoY), and Brave ($5, $100M annualized revenue in March 2025).
- Personal & prosumer agents like Instinct (~$1.35B raised, Kleiner Perkins), Meta's Muse, Town ($181M raised, Andreessen Horowitz) & Grok Bot are expanding demand for AI search beyond coding & company research into shopping, travel & everyday errands, with Exa launching search for ecommerce, local businesses, real-time weather, flights, transit & sports in October 2026.
- Following Clay’s ($200M ARR in September 2026) model of aggregating third-party data & charging for enrichment workflows, AI search APIs are becoming data marketplaces for agents, with Exa Connect (June 2026) combining web research with paid databases (Similarweb, ZoomInfo, Crunchbase) & billing for agent runs plus provider calls, alongside Parallel (Data Connectors & Index), Firecrawl (Alexandria) & Perplexity (Agent API’s Finance & People Search).
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Exa (dataset)
- Will Bryk, CEO of Exa, on building search for AI agents
- Exa at $10M growing 11x YoY
- Ex-employee at Exa on building search infrastructure for AI data pipelines
- Parallel
- Perplexity (dataset)
- Tavily
- You.com (dataset)
- Apollo.io (dataset)
- Product manager at Cohere on enterprise AI search infrastructure and deep research agents
- Product manager at Ecosia on building AI-powered summaries with search
- $100M/year PostHog of vector databases
- Perplexity Computer vs Claude Cowork
- Apollo.io at $265M ARR
