For creative and marketing teams, a simple cloud storage solution often falls short. These teams need to sift through large numbers of files to find what they’re looking for. The problem is getting worse: AI is accelerating content generation, meaning more media files than ever, which makes the task even trickier.
A New York-based startup called Shade is building a cloud storage platform designed for agencies, sports media teams, consumer brands, real estate companies, and podcasters to store and search their media files easily.
The company announced Wednesday that it closed $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital in March. The nearly four-year-old startup has raised $20 million in total, with General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary also on its cap table.
Shade was founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove in 2024. The two had been friends since high school. They decided to build something together after growing frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox when it came to searching for files.
“We built it out of our frustration as creatives – [where we were contending with] stacks and stacks of hard drives and issues where we were using Dropbox drive frame and all of the tools under the sun…it was time to build one single source of truth,” Fan said.
He sees Shade as occupying an interesting niche as a creative file storage system around which companies can build workflows.
“As you make more content, you need to be thinking more about the workflows around the content. I like to say it’s similar to CRMs 20 years ago, when we were thinking about how to organize all the information that we had around our contacts and in all of our companies,” he said.
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Shade points to two distinguishing features. First, it offers natural language search powered by auto-tagging. The startup said that this search doesn’t just surface a particular video — it identifies the exact moment in the video where a scene matching the search query occurs. For instance, users can search for “a person holding a laptop in snow,” and the system will surface all matching clips with timestamps.
The tool also automatically transcribes videos for easier search. Users can search based on meaning, transcripts, and facial recognition for labeled individuals.
Second, Shade uses a “streamable” file system that lets you mount your cloud storage to your local filesystem and start working with a file almost immediately, without waiting for it to fully download first. Users can also pin files to access them even in low-bandwidth conditions. Typically, with a storage system like Google Drive or Dropbox, you have to wait for a large file to download before editing it. Shade’s streamable system lets you get started right away.
Beyond storage and search, Shade makes it easy for teams to collaborate — with the ability to leave feedback tied to a video at a specific timestamp. They can also attach files in comments to give direction. Shade lets teams create multiple links for the same assets with varying permissions, and teams can set access-based roles.
For final deliveries to clients, teams can create branded file collections with password protection and expiry dates.
For small teams, Shade offers a $20 per seat, per month plan that includes unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing, and 500GB of active storage per seat. The plan supports up to 15 seats per workspace and up to 150 guests for collaboration.
Shade isn’t alone in this space. Startups like Poly and Memories.ai are also working on AI-powered file storage and search for large numbers of files.
Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, said that while AI has accelerated content creation, managing those creations remains messy.
“Most companies are layering search on top of existing storage. Shade rebuilt the stack from first principles, spanning streaming, indexing, and collaboration in one system. That architectural approach is harder, but it is why the product actually works, not just as a bolt-on feature,” Rabois said over email.
He added that while search is the starting point, Shade could become a key tool for automating sharing and versioning.
In the coming months, Shade plans to improve its search across different file types, including images, videos, and documents. The startup is also building a no-code platform — meaning one that requires no programming knowledge — to let creative teams create automated workflows based on files in the system.
“We’re essentially building the Lego blocks that allow you to [operate] any type of business, you have that ability to apply shade to your workflow, whether that is, today, just creative teams, [or] in the future, research and investment teams,” Fan said.
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