Exa, an AI search technology company, has opened its first Asian office in Singapore to build core engineering for its retrieval infrastructure. The office will develop web-scale systems to handle exabytes of data as part of the company's effort to rebuild search infrastructure for AI applications. The Singapore team will work in the same time zone as Asia-Pacific customers and tap local engineering talent. Singapore's Economic Development Board welcomed the move as a vote of confidence in the city-state as an AI hub. Exa uses a per-query pricing model rather than advertising, with customers including Databricks and Amazon Web Services. The company has raised $85 million at a $700 million valuation whilst developing what it calls a "data layer for AI applications".

A $700M Nvidia-backed AI search startup is hiring. Only rebels need apply. Mar 30, 2026, 6:00 AM PT * An Nvidia-backed AI search startup is expanding to Singapore. * Exa's CEO, Will Byrk, told Business Insider the startup is hiring "rebellious" engineers. * The world of search is shifting, and engineers need to think from first principles, Bryk said. An Nvidia-backed startup is looking for "rebellious" engineers to help rebuild search for the AI era. Exa, which builds search infrastructure for AI applications, said it is opening a Singapore office on Monday as part of its push into Asia-Pacific. Exa has only a handful of staff in Asia-Pacific, and plans to hire up to 10 engineers across backend, infrastructure, and product roles in the coming months. In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, CEO Will Byrk said he is hiring "rebellious" engineers. "Someone who doesn't care about the status quo, how things were done in the past, can think from first principles about everything - that's really important," he said. Search systems built for AI are still new, and they require rethinking how search works because humans and AI behave differently, he added. "I don't believe it when people say you can't do something. So I think we want engineers who feel the same way," Byrk said. Byrk also said Exa prioritizes candidates' values above all else, and the company is open to hiring junior and senior engineers. "Do they really have passion for building search or building large-scale systems?" he said, adding that experience is "not as important." To assess candidates for their character, Exa flies them to San Francisco to work with the team for one to two days. Exa has about 80 employees globally and is actively hiring in San Francisco, Zurich, and Singapore. "That allows us to really see what a person's like, because you don't just get to see their output on a real project, but you also, you know, eat with them at lunch and dinner," he said. "You really get to know a person." Byrk added that the best engineers should move fast and use AI tools effectively. Most of the company's code is written by AI, he said. Expansion into Singapore. Exa raised $85 million in a Series B round led by Benchmark in September at a $700 million valuation. Investors include Lightspeed, YCombinator, and NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm. The company, founded in 2021, said it serves web search to thousands of customers, including AI startups such as Cursor, as well as private equity and consulting firms. "The number of searches from AIs are going to exceed the number of humans," Byrk told Business Insider. "The whole world of search is shifting." Byrk said the Singapore office will serve as a "massive scale infrastructure," including data pipelines and crawling infrastructure to gather and process information across the internet. "Singapore has some of the best engineering talent in the world," Byrk said. "People are really smart, and they have a lot of hustle." Do you have a story to share about AI startups in Asia? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

Introducing Browserbase Search. Thomas Katwan Software Engineer Harsehaj Dhami Growth Engineer March 17, 2026 TL;DR: Browserbase, Inc. is launching Browserbase Search, a simple API that lets agents search the web and get back relevant URLs to start navigating. It's powered by Exa and natively integrated into the Browserbase platform. Your agents need to search the web, just like humans. That sounds simple, but it turns out to be one of the first problems every agent runs into. When an agent doesn't know the exact URL it needs, it has to figure out where to start. That usually means running a search. Browserbase, Inc. has seen this pattern over and over again across Browserbase workloads. In fact, during its last billing cycle, Browserbase, Inc. saw 4.5 million requests to google.com run through its proxies. Search is one of the most common first steps agents take before navigating to the page where real work happens. Since Browserbase, Inc. already provide the agent infrastructure to interact with the web, Browserbase, Inc. thought it made sense to bring search into the platform as well. So Browserbase, Inc. built Browserbase Search, a Search API optimized for agents, accessible via its REST API, TypeScript and Python SDK with AI-native formats such as JSON, Markdown or HTML. Powered by Exa. To power the search layer, Browserbase, Inc. has partnered with Exa, which has built one of the best search APIs designed specifically for AI agents Exa's models are optimized for navigational queries, which typically run when agents are looking for a specific page or resource on the web. That makes it a natural fit for the types of workflows its customers and developers are already building on Browserbase. By combining Exa's search with its browser infrastructure, agents can now search for where they need to start and immediately navigate to it in just a few lines of code. The API. The Search API is intentionally simple. You send a query and get back the relevant results. import {Browserbase} from "@browserbasehq/sdk"; const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY!}); const searchResponse = await bb.search.web({ query: "a web browser for ai agents", numResults: 10,}); { "requestId": "string", "query": "a web browser for ai agents", "results": [{ "id": "string", "url": "string", "title": "string", "image": "Image URL if available", "favicon": "Image URL if available",}]} That's it. Every result returns a page url and when available, a title and description. Results are ranked by relevance, and optimized for navigational queries. An agent might search for relevant pages, fetch their contents, and then decide whether it needs to launch a browser to interact with a page. Search | (Fetch) | browse. Search helps the agent discover where to go, Fetch retrieves the page content, and browsers handle deeper interaction. Together, these primitives make it easier to build agents that can understand and navigate the web all in one platform. Get started. Search is available on all plans with 1,000 free searches per month, included. Read more in the docs. Happy searching!