Exa combined sales and product teams to move at the speed of AI

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AI search engine Exa isn’t one to follow the crowd. Founded in 2021, its main product is pioneering. It’s the engine under the hood for a host of AI developers: in layman’s terms, it’s Google Search for AI.

Training a technology with an insatiable appetite for knowledge is no small task; this is search infrastructure that needs to dive to unfathomable depths. The company recently raised a $85 million Series B, bringing its valuation up to $700 million.

Despite boasting such a powerful tool, Exa has reorganized itself to do without a product team. Instead, the company has created a hybrid sales and engineering team designed to build effective products led by consumer desire.

The company spoke with Revenue Brew about why emphasizing sales is giving it an edge.

Creating a win-win situation

Vishal Khanna, Exa’s head of product and technical GTM, said that combining sales and product employees not only helps product understand what customers are asking for, but it helps sellers better understand product.

“We have both the sales lens but also care a lot about our developer relations and [product-led growth] base…It’s not structured as those two as silos. There are many things that apply across both,” he said.

Khanna mentioned a recent example where, mid-sales process, his sales team received a complex feature request from a customer, and the integration between departments meant the request was able to be accommodated quickly.

“If we had to liaise between different teams and different folks on our side, that might have been slower, likely lower quality, because there are multiple hubs of information,” Khanna said. “But we got a really great result, and [the customer] is a scale user of our API card.”

Beyond the internal restructuring signaling a sales emphasis, Khanna said the combined team doesn’t just bring employees closer to each other, it brings them closer to the customer.

“The longer-term gain is our product/go-to-market team has so much on-the-ground signal as to what to build next, so not in response to a customer request, but rather proactively thinking forward,” he said. “Knowledge is only useful insofar as someone wants it and can use it for some business activity.”

Empowering product

Compound titles are more common than not at Exa, and Nitya Sridhar, product and marketing lead, is no exception.

“We’ve built our team structure to encourage folks to operate at the intersection of various roles,” Sridhar told Revenue Brew via email. “Not only does this compound speed at each step, it means our core product offering can react in real time to customer feedback.”

Sridhar’s strategic positioning is emblematic of the technical qualifications each Exa employee must have. While she runs marketing, Sridhar often uses coding agents to “dogfood” products and fix smaller bugs. She also said that she uses AI tools to assist in ideation design cycles.

Sridhar’s role appears to be a function of a company that prioritizes speed and efficiency.

“Instead of building from abstract roadmaps, we build based on real demand sales are seeing in live conversations. Our team gets a direct signal on what matters, validates product ideas immediately, and helps to close deals faster,” she said.

Expert insight: AI revenue strategy

Mark Weinstein, tech entrepreneur and author of Restoring Our Sanity Online, said Exa’s pivot to this alternative structure is part of a broader move for businesses toward a RevOps function.

“Your product team is not a stand-alone team. Your sales team is not a stand-alone team. Everybody now coalesces, and it’s a very tight team,” he said.

Weinstein says this type of structure is also very attractive to venture capital firms, which love to invest in “early movers.” The faster Exa can grow, the more firmly it can establish itself as one. 

“VC salivates at the early mover advantage,” he said.

Weinstein also credited Exa for creating teams that reflect how the company is trying to grow and where it’s hoping to go.

“They want to be the Google of AI, so this requires a RevOps team, not a product team, because AI is the service,” Weinstein said. “They just put the roadmap in for how they want the AI foundation that they’re using to function; they don’t need a product team for that.”