Exa, the semantic search API company that recently hit a $2.2B valuation, has launched its Exa Agent directly inside Google Sheets. The move takes a capability that was previously only accessible via API calls and puts it in front of anyone who can open a spreadsheet. If you have a column of company names and want to fill in funding rounds, executive names, or competitor lists, you can now do that with a sidebar click.
What Exa Actually Is
Exa is a web search API designed for teams building applications that need real-time web data. It performs semantic search using embeddings, extracts clean content from search results, and provides direct answers with citations. The key difference from a standard search API is how it finds things: unlike traditional keyword search APIs that return pages matching exact keywords, Exa uses neural embeddings to find content semantically similar to your query, retrieving pages that express the same ideas or information even without exact word matches.
Today, Exa claims to be the highest quality search API at every latency, powering search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, Monday.com, and over 400,000 developers. The Google Sheets add-on is a direct attempt to bring that infrastructure to non-developer users.
The Exa Agent: What Changed
The headline feature in this Sheets update is Exa Agent, which Exa launched just days before the Sheets announcement. This is not just a search function. Exa Agent combines top language models with Exa's state-of-the-art web search tools to achieve exhaustive and accurate results, and it is highly effective on deep research, list-building, and entity enrichment tasks.
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