# Will Bryk

> Will Bryk is the co-founder and CEO of Exa, a neural search engine built for the AI era. A Harvard CS and physics graduate who interned at SpaceX and engineered AI products at Cresta, Bryk left to answer a question that gnawed at him: what if Google was already obsolete? Exa reimagines search using transformer-based link prediction - what Bryk calls 'neural PageRank on steroids' - to help AI agents find exactly the right information rather than keyword-stuffed SEO noise. The company raised $85M in a Benchmark-led Series B at a $700M valuation in September 2025, with Nvidia and Lightspeed also backing the bet that AI systems will soon generate more search queries than humans.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Exa
- **Organizations:** Exa, Y Combinator
- **From:** New York City, United States
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** A.B. in Joint Computer Science and Physics, Harvard University, Physics and Engineering (exchange/study), Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
- **Known for:** Co-founded Exa (formerly Metaphor Systems), pioneering neural search for AI agents, Raised $85M Series B at $700M valuation from Benchmark, Nvidia, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator, Built a $5M H200 GPU cluster (144 GPUs) for training and search infrastructure

## Career timeline

- **2016** — Software engineering intern at SpaceX
- **2018** — Intern at Zoox (autonomous vehicles)
- **2019** — Software engineer at Cresta, building real-time AI products; one of first engineers
- **2021** — Left Cresta to co-found Metaphor Systems (later Exa) with Jeff Wang; joined Y Combinator Summer 2021
- **2021** — Raised $5M seed from Y Combinator and others with pitch 'We are better than Google'
- **2024** — Raised $17M Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator; rebranded from Metaphor to Exa
- **2025-01** — Launched Exa 2.1 as state-of-the-art neural search; rebranded company as Exa
- **2025-09** — Raised $85M Series B led by Benchmark at $700M valuation (10x increase from Series A)

## Achievements

- Co-founded Exa (formerly Metaphor Systems), pioneering neural search for AI agents
- Raised $85M Series B at $700M valuation from Benchmark, Nvidia, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator
- Built a $5M H200 GPU cluster (144 GPUs) for training and search infrastructure
- Grew Exa to 120 employees and thousands of API customers including Cursor and major PE/consulting firms
- Co-president of Harvard Undergraduate Robotics Club (100+ members, 8-year multi-robot projects)
- Interned at SpaceX while at Harvard
- Developed 'neural PageRank' approach using transformer models for link prediction

## Latest updates

- **2025-09** — Exa raises $85M Series B at $700M valuation led by Benchmark, with Nvidia, Lightspeed, and YC participating. Peter Fenton joins board.
- **2025-09** — Exa plans to significantly expand GPU cluster and indexing infrastructure with new funding.
- **2025-01** — Exa rebrands from Metaphor Systems to Exa, launches Exa 2.1 claiming state-of-the-art neural search.
- **2024** — Exa releases Websets product - converts web searches into structured, grid-format data for building databases from web pages.

## Links

- Website: https://exa.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-bryk
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/WilliamBryk

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/will-bryk
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-09