Jeffrey Wang

Jeffrey Wang is co-founder of Exa, which builds web search infrastructure for AI applications and agents. He started the company, first called Metaphor, with Will Bryk, his college roommate.

Running a GPU Cluster in a Harvard Dorm

Wang studied computer science and philosophy at Harvard, where he ran a GPU cluster in his dorm room and roomed with Bryk, according to his AI Engineer speaker profile. The two worked on early search-engine experiments in college. Before Exa, Wang spent three years building data and web infrastructure at Plaid.

Searching the Web by Meaning at Metaphor

Metaphor pursued retrieval by meaning: a descriptive request could find relevant pages even when they did not contain the same words. In early 2023 the team shifted toward a search API for AI applications, and Metaphor became Exa in January 2024. Exa built its own crawling infrastructure, indexes, embedding models, and retrieval systems. YesPress lists the company as founded in 2021 in San Francisco, California.