New York-based startup Shade has closed a $14 million funding round to expand its AI-powered cloud storage platform built for creative and marketing teams. The round, led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital, was finalized in March 2026 and brings the company’s total funding to $20 million. General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary are also among its investors.
Shade was founded in 2024 by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove, who have been friends since high school. The two built the platform after growing frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox when searching for files across large media libraries. “We built it out of our frustration as creatives — 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.
The platform targets agencies, sports media teams, consumer brands, real estate companies, and podcasters. Its core feature is natural language search: users can type a plain-English description — such as “a person holding a laptop in snow” — and Shade surfaces matching video clips along with the specific timestamps where those scenes occur. The system also auto-tags files, transcribes video content, and supports search by meaning, transcript text, and facial recognition for labeled individuals.
A second key feature is a streamable file system that mounts cloud storage to a user’s local filesystem, allowing work to begin on a file almost immediately without waiting for a full download. Users can also pin files for access in low-bandwidth conditions — a departure from platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox, which require a complete download before editing.
Shade also includes collaboration tools such as timestamp-linked video feedback, file attachments in comments, role-based access controls, and multiple permission levels for shared links. For client deliveries, teams can create branded file collections with password protection and expiry dates.
Pricing starts at $20 per seat per month for small teams, which includes unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing, and 500GB of active storage per seat, with support for up to 15 seats and 150 guests per workspace.
Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, said the platform’s architecture sets it apart from competitors. “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,” he said. Rabois added that search is the starting point, but Shade could become a key tool for automating sharing and versioning.
The startup faces competition from other AI-powered file storage and search platforms, including Poly and Memories.ai. Looking ahead, Shade plans to extend its search capabilities across images, videos, and documents, and is developing a no-code platform to let teams build automated workflows around their files. Fan described the longer-term vision as applicable beyond creative teams, potentially reaching research and investment teams as well.
Source: TechCrunch