Will Bryk at a glance
Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
Role | Co-founder and CEO of Exa, formerly Metaphor, since 2021 |
Co-founder | Jeff Wang, his roommate at Harvard |
Education | Harvard, computer science and physics, class of 2019 (GitHub) |
Before Exa | One of the first engineers at Cresta; internships at SpaceX and Zoox |
Grew up in | New York City; lives in San Francisco |
Age | 27 in July 2024; no birth date published |
Net worth | No published estimate |
None published; he asks people to DM him | |
X |
Exa CEO email address: how to reach Will Bryk
Bryk hasn’t published an email address. When he invites people to get in touch, on X and LinkedIn, he asks them to send a direct message, and X is where he posts most: launches, hires and Exa’s numbers. Exa staff use their full first name at exa.ai: {first}@exa.ai, such as maya@exa.ai for a fictional Maya Chen.
Channel | Address | Note |
|---|---|---|
X | His most active channel; open to direct messages | |
Posts Exa milestones | ||
Exa sales | sales@exa.ai | For companies that want to use Exa |
Exa email address pattern
Exa staff use their full first name at exa.ai: {first}@exa.ai, such as maya@exa.ai for a fictional Maya Chen.
Format | Example (fictional name: Maya Chen) | Who uses it | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
{first}@exa.ai | maya@exa.ai | 31 of 33 staff addresses Exa’s people have published | Current, standard |
{f}{last}@exa.ai | mchen@exa.ai | Possibly one address | Rare |
{first}.{last}@exa.ai | maya.chen@exa.ai | No one we could find | Not used |
Before emailing any pattern-based address, run it through a verifier: a bounce hurts deliverability for every later send. All Exa patterns and official inboxes are on the Exa email format page.
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Career timeline
Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
Oct 13, 2026 | Announces Exa has passed $100 million in annualized revenue (Exa) |
Aug 21, 2026 | Hires Jeff Pinner, formerly of Robinhood and Lyft, as CTO |
May 20, 2026 | $250 million Series C led by a16z, at a $2.2 billion valuation (Exa) |
Sep 3, 2025 | $85 million Series B led by Benchmark, at $700 million (Exa) |
Jul 16, 2024 | $17 million Series A led by Lightspeed |
Jan 25, 2024 | Renames Metaphor to Exa (Exa) |
Nov 2022 | Launches Metaphor’s search engine |
2021 | Co-founds Metaphor with Jeff Wang; Y Combinator, Summer 2021 (Y Combinator) |
Until 2021 | Software engineer at Cresta, an AI startup for customer support |
2015 to 2019 | Harvard: computer science and physics; leads the robotics club; internships at SpaceX and Zoox |
How Will Bryk built Exa
Bryk grew up in New York and met Jeff Wang in their first year at Harvard; as roommates they built a search engine together (Exa). After graduating he joined Cresta as one of its first engineers, building real-time AI products, and wrote a book about the history of civilization in his spare time. “When I realized the future of civilization depends almost entirely on the quality of information we consume, I left to start Exa,” he writes (Y Combinator).
The idea, in 2021, was a better Google: “Transformers normally predict the next word. We train our search engine to predict the next link” (TechCrunch). Metaphor’s search engine launched in November 2022, two weeks before ChatGPT. When AI developers asked for its results through an API, Bryk turned the company toward search for AI, which took revenue past $100 million a year by October 2026. He calls Exa “the OpenAI of search… a research startup that does like fundamental research” (Latent Space).
Will Bryk’s age and net worth
Bryk was 27 in July 2024 (TechCrunch), and graduated from Harvard in 2019; no birth date has been published. No estimate of his net worth has been published either. Exa is private, valued at $2.2 billion in May 2026, and the founders’ stakes aren’t disclosed.
Jeff Wang, Exa’s co-founder
Jeff Wang studied computer science and philosophy at Harvard, where he ran a GPU cluster in his dorm room and shared a room with Bryk, then spent three years building data and web infrastructure at Plaid (Exa). He was 26 in July 2024. He sits on Exa’s board and now works on how Exa sells, building what he calls knowledge systems for go-to-market teams.
In his own words
“We need to build superknowledge before superintelligence.”
— Will Bryk, July 12, 2024 (Exa)
“Today, searching the internet feels more like navigating a landfill.”
— Will Bryk, January 25, 2024
“I remember when I told my dad I was building a new search engine in 2021, he replied, ‘Isn’t Google already good enough?’. It’s not good enough.”
— Will Bryk, January 7, 2025 (Exa)
“Because Google makes money from ads, they’re not actually optimized to build the best general search engine in the world.”
— Will Bryk, May 6, 2025 (Hacker News)
“Information is critical civilizational infrastructure for our new AI reality.”
— Will Bryk, May 20, 2026
Exa’s leadership
Person | Role |
|---|---|
Will Bryk | Co-founder and CEO |
Jeff Wang | Co-founder and director |
Jeff Pinner | CTO since August 2026, formerly CTO of Robinhood and of Lyft (X) |
Marcus Holm | Chief revenue officer since May 2026, formerly president of LaunchDarkly |
Liam Hinzman | Head of R&D product engineering |
Exa’s funding, revenue and products are on the Exa company profile. a16z’s partner Sarah Wang, who led the Series C, joined the board (a16z).
