Metaphor

Metaphor, now rebranded as Exa, is a modern AI-powered search engine and API platform designed to give developers and AI agents access to high-quality web search, content extraction, and structured data retrieval. Unlike traditional search engines that rely on keyword matching, Exa uses neural network-based semantic understanding to find content based on meaning, context, and conceptual similarity. The platform maintains a massive web index of over 70 million companies and dedicated high-quality indexes for specific verticals including people, code documentation, financial data, and news, making it particularly powerful for enrichment and research workflows.

Exa is built primarily as a developer-first API platform, offering products including Search, Contents, Answer, and Websets. The Search API delivers results in under 180 milliseconds, making it suitable for powering real-time AI agent workflows. Its structured output capability allows developers to extract specific data fields from search results, enabling complex enrichment pipelines. The Highlights feature intelligently extracts the most relevant excerpts from web pages, helping reduce token budgets and LLM costs by over 50 percent when feeding results into language models.

The platform is trusted by leading AI companies including OpenRouter, Databricks, Flatfile, StackAI, and Anara for use cases ranging from powering coding agents to scientific research workflows. Exa offers enterprise-grade security with SOC 2 Type II certification, Zero Data Retention options for privacy-sensitive deployments, and Single Sign-On for team management. Whether you are building an AI agent that needs real-time web context, conducting deep research across the web, or assembling structured datasets from unstructured sources, Exa provides the infrastructure to do so programmatically at scale.