# How Exa uses Zilliz

**\<200ms** Neural search latency with Exa Instant, reduced

As published on [zilliz.com](https://zilliz.com/customers/exa). Captured by usedby on 2026-10-06.

- Company: [Exa](https://www.usedby.ai/companies/exa.md)
- Tool: [Zilliz](https://www.usedby.ai/tools/zilliz.md)

## What the story says

Exa uses Zilliz Cloud (managed Milvus) to power its entity search layer for companies, people, and code, serving as the primary index and recency cache. It handles hybrid dense and sparse vector search with metadata filtering and frequent upserts, feeding Exa's Search API and Websets product.

Summary written by usedby from the source page, in English. The figures are those of Zilliz and Exa, not ours.

> Hybrid search combining dense vectors, sparse vectors, RRF reranking, and metadata filters in a single API call. Exa Instant reduced neural search latency from seconds to under 200ms

> Zilliz Cloud has been an important part of Exa’s journey to build and scale entity search, giving us the retrieval performance and operational simplicity we need to scale quickly and confidently.
>
> Jeffrey Wang, Co-Founder

> Zilliz gave us real-time retrieval for our AI search system at scale with tight latency targets. It freed up engineering cycles and let us focus on improving reasoning on the model side, not managing infrastructure.
>
> Jeffrey Wang, Co-Founder

> We believe AI agents will become a fundamental interface for how people work, learn, and make decisions, and that only happens if those systems can access real-world information with speed, precision, and trust.
>
> Jeffrey Wang, Co-founder of Exa

## What usedby checked

We compared the story with its live page on 2026-10-06.

- Checked: the figure \<200ms is on the page; its label is our wording.
- Checked: the passage quoted above is copied word for word from the page, near the name of Exa.
- Checked: Exa uses Zilliz. Confirmed line. Latest check across sources: 2026-10-06.
- Not checked: the result itself. We quote it; we did not measure it.

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Source: https://www.usedby.ai/case-studies/exa-zilliz · How we check: https://www.usedby.ai/methodology