SF team building the next generation of search
Will Bryk
CEO
Will was one of the first engineers at Cresta where he built real time AI products. He studied CS and physics at Harvard, where he researched human/AI interaction and led the robotics club. Will considers himself an expert in both embedding models and chocolate chip cookies -- the jury is still out on which is more critical for company operations.
Jeff Wang
Co-founder
Jeff spent three years building data and web infra at Plaid. He studied CS and Philosophy at Harvard, where he ran a GPU cluster in his dorm room and was roommates with Will. The team estimates that 20% of social analysis in San Francisco traces back to one of Jeff's many viral tweets.
Shreyas Sreenivas
Technical Staff
Shreyas previously worked on various projects, from training neural networks in Haskell to building a game streaming engine. He studied CS at the University of Waterloo. You can typically find Shreyas analyzing the price/performance of AWS services or crushing the team in basketball, sometimes at the same time.
Isabelle Hughes
Growth
Isabelle previously was at Mckinsey consulting for tech companies. She studied politics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Isabelle has the remarkable ability to work intensely on one screen while at the same time watching a technical lecture on another. The team is unsure whether this comes from McKinsey training or is just an Australian thing.
Thais Branco
Marketing
Thais was previously VP of Marketing at Nate, Hubla and most recently co-founded her own startup in Brazil. She studied Economics and Econometrics at the University of Chicago. She might beat Exa's search in the amount of restaurant recommendations or Taylor Swift references she can provide on the spot.
Vishal Khanna
GTM
Vishal was previously a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., and was part of the strategy team at TikTok Australia. He studied EECS and Finance at Monash University Australia. Vishal is the very rare person who can both code up any product and sell it to anyone. Given his messianic startup skills and obsession with Dune 2, some believe the similarity between 'Vishal' and 'Paul' is more than a coincidence.
Felix Zeller
Technical Staff
Felix previously worked on opensource projects from next-gen text editors to composable knowledge management systems. He (almost) studied CS and philosophy at UIUC until he realized that he is already a beast. The only job Felix should not do is corrosion engineering, because he deeply wishes to convert the world into rust.
Stacey Tara
People + Workplace Ops
Stacey previously worked on customer success and business development at YC-backed Awesomic. She got a bachelors in German Philology and a masters in communications from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, basically the Harvard of Ukraine. Stacey goes by many names at Exa -- workplace operator, recruiting coordinator, chief happiness officer -- but perhaps her most beloved name is "greatest cookie baker of all time". These cookies are unfairly delicious.
You
Technical staff
You previously worked on some project that demonstrated exceptional skill. You studied CS at somewhere, but far more importantly want to learn by joining a startup working on massive-scale ML/infra. You are excited to tackle a mission as old as ancient greece -- organize the world's knowledge -- and recognize that to do that You must meet Us and become We.
What we do
Exa is building web search for AI. Exa’s API lets developers and companies bring the world's knowledge into their AI applications.
Whereas traditional search engines are optimized for human clicks, AI applications need a search engine that’s powerful and precise enough to retrieve hundreds of results with the best information. Exa is the first search engine built for exactly that use case.
Under the hood, Exa trains embedding models, using the same technology behind ChatGPT, to convert web pages into lists of numbers known as embeddings. This technology packs the power of large language models (LLMs) into the search process itself, making search smarter than keyword approaches like Google. Smarter search grounds AI applications in the most relevant world knowledge.
Thousands of companies and developers have integrated Exa, from AI writing assistants helping students cite relevant papers, to VC firms sourcing highly specific startups, to AI research teams at companies like Databricks assembling large, high quality training datasets.
Careers at Exa
Our information ecosystem is broken, and the best way to fix it is to combine LLMs with high quality content from the Internet.
See open roles