An on-device AI media-search tool that indexes the videos, audio, images, meetings, and files already on your machine and retrieves any moment by natural-language query; it hit a $250M valuation on August 31, 2026.
Last verified · 2026-08-31 · by Moe Ameen
Clipto is an on-device AI media-search application. Rather than store your media in the cloud, it indexes what's already on your computer or phone — videos, audio recordings, images, meetings, and documents — and builds a local searchable index, so you find a specific moment by describing it in plain language instead of scrubbing through files by hand. Founded in 2023 by Henry Kang, the San Francisco company reached a $250 million post-money valuation on August 31, 2026 after a $15 million all-equity round, per TechCrunch, backed by HSG (formerly Sequoia China), GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, 522 Ventures, and angels Hans Tung and Lu Zhang.
The differentiator is that processing runs locally rather than in the cloud, which matters when the corpus is your own raw footage, recorded calls, and personal photos. Per Clipto's own site, on-device processing applies to the Mac and Windows (beta) apps; the iPhone, Android, and web versions are cloud-powered instead. Clipto recently added Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, so an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude can query your indexed media — with the company stating each access requires the user's active request and authorization.
Traction is real: Clipto reports 30M+ people have used its products since launch, hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, more than $15 million in ARR (reported at the start of 2026), and profitability on a net-income basis. Pricing is subscription-based with a 7-day free trial — around $24.99/month, or roughly $12.49/month billed annually per clipto.com. Treat specific figures as a snapshot on a fast-scaling product and confirm current tiers on the site.
The honest framing for a creator: Clipto is a retrieval layer, not a content studio. It finds and hands back the moment — a file, a clip, a timestamp — but it has no video editor, no clipper, no caption burner, no image or carousel generator, no persona or brand-voice layer, and no scheduler or publisher. Producing something from what it finds, and distributing it, is out of scope by design.
The smart way to use Clipto for content isn't to hunt for one clip — it's to mine. Run a standing set of natural-language searches across everything you've ever recorded: "every time I answered a pricing objection," "each customer describing their result," "the strongest 60 seconds of every webinar." Clipto hands back a ranked shortlist of timestamps and files for each query. That shortlist is a content backlog you didn't know you were sitting on — but Clipto stops at the list. It has no editor, no caption tool, no brand layer, and no publisher, so a queue of raw moments is exactly where its job ends. [Kompozy](/) is what turns that queue into finished content, and the handoff is a mapping: each type of clip you mined feeds the Kompozy format built for it.
A teaching moment becomes a [Clipped Short](/glossary/clipped-short) with branded captions, plus a [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) that re-delivers the point on camera in your voice. A testimonial becomes a Quote Graphic and a slide inside a brand-exact [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes). A product demo becomes the hook of a [Marketing Short](/glossary/marketing-shorts). From those same sources Kompozy also fans out a Blog Article and an Email Newsletter, every piece written to one [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) so a batch mined from years of scattered footage still reads as a single brand. Then [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) reframes each cut to 9:16 with burned-in captions, schedules it, and publishes across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. Clipto mines the archive into a queue of raw moments; Kompozy turns that queue into a month of on-brand, published content — the search finds the supply, the engine ships the output.
Clipto is an on-device AI media-search app that indexes the videos, audio, images, meetings, and files already on your device and lets you find any moment by describing it in natural language. Founded in 2023 by Henry Kang, it reached a $250M valuation on August 31, 2026, and processing runs locally on the Mac and Windows (beta) apps — the iPhone, Android, and web versions are cloud-powered instead.
No. Clipto retrieves the moment you describe but has no video editor, clipper, caption tool, brand layer, or publisher. To cut a located clip into a captioned vertical short, produce a full on-brand release from it, and post it across platforms, pair Clipto with a content engine like Kompozy.
On Mac and Windows, Clipto states its indexing and search run locally rather than in the cloud, so your footage, calls, and photos stay on the machine; the iPhone, Android, and web versions are cloud-powered instead, per Clipto's own site. When an AI tool queries the index via MCP, the company says access requires the user's active request and authorization each time.
Run a batch of natural-language searches to mine your archive into a queue of clips by type, then feed each into Kompozy: a teaching moment becomes a Clipped Short and a Persona Short, a testimonial becomes a Quote Graphic and a Carousel slide, a demo becomes a Marketing Short hook. Kompozy also fans a blog and a newsletter from the same source in one Persona Brief voice, then schedules and publishes across eight social platforms plus blog and email.
Clipto is subscription-based with a 7-day free trial — around $24.99/month, or roughly $12.49/month billed annually (about $149.88/year) per clipto.com. It reports more than $15M in ARR, 30M+ users, and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Confirm current tiers on clipto.com, as pricing can change and vary by platform.