I will sketch the construction - following ideas of Kontsevich and Nori - of a Tannakian category of exponential motives over a subfield of the complex numbers. It is a universal cohomology theory for pairs of varieties and regular functions, whose de Rham and Betti realizations are given by twisted de Rham and rapid decay cohomology respectively. The upshot is that one can attach to any such pair a motivic Galois group which conjecturally generalizes the Mumford-Tate group of a Hodge structure and, over number fields, governs all algebraic relations between exponential periods. This is a joint work with Peter Jossen (ETH).[-]