Shade invested $14 million to help creative teams discover their video library in plain English.

For creative and marketing teams, simple cloud storage solutions are often not enough. These teams must sift through large numbers of files to find what they are looking for. The problem is getting worse. AI is accelerating content creation, which means more media files than ever before, making the task more challenging.

A New York-based startup called Shade is building a cloud storage platform designed to help agencies, sports media teams, consumer brands, real estate companies, and podcasters easily store and retrieve media files.

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 a total of $20 million, including from General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary.

Shade was founded in 2024 by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove. The two have been friends since high school. After becoming frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox for retrieving files, they decided to create something together.

“We built it to overcome some of the frustrations of being a creator: stacks and stacks of hard drives and the challenges of using Dropbox drive frames and every tool under the sun. It was time to build a single source of truth,” Fan said.

He sees Shade occupying an interesting niche as a creative file storage system that allows businesses to build workflows.

“The more content you create, the more you have to think about the workflow around that content. I would say this is similar to CRM 20 years ago, when we were thinking about how to organize all the information we had about our contacts and all our companies,” he said.

Shade refers to two distinct characteristics. First, it provides a natural language search function through automatic tagging. The startup said this search does not surface specific videos, but rather identifies the exact moment in a video that a scene matching the search term occurs. For example, if a user searches for “person holding laptop in snow,” the system will display all matching clips along with their timestamps.

The tool also automatically transcribes videos for easier retrieval. Users can search based on the meaning, script, and facial recognition of labeled individuals.

Second, Shade uses a “streamable” file system that allows you to mount cloud storage to your local file system and start working with files almost immediately, without waiting for them to be completely downloaded. Users can also pin files to access them even in low bandwidth conditions. Typically, storage systems like Google Drive or Dropbox require you to wait for large files to download before editing them. Shade’s streamable system lets you get started right away.

In addition to storage and search, Shade makes team collaboration easier with the ability to leave feedback linked to videos with a specific timestamp. You may also attach files to your comments to provide guidance. Shade allows teams to create multiple links to the same asset with different permissions, and teams can set access-based roles.

For final delivery to the customer, the team can create a collection of branded files with password protection and expiration 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. This plan supports up to 15 seats per workspace and up to 150 guests for collaboration.

Shade is not alone in this space. Startups like Poly and Memories.ai are also working on AI-based file storage and bulk file retrieval.

Keith Rabois, managing director of Khosla Ventures, said that while AI has accelerated content creation, managing these productions remains messy.

“Most companies are adding search capabilities on top of traditional storage,” Rabois said via email. “Shade has rebuilt the stack into one system based on first principles that encompasses streaming, indexing, and collaboration. This architectural approach is more difficult, but that’s why the product actually works.”

He added that while search is a starting point, Shade can be a key tool for automating sharing and versioning.

In the coming months, Shade plans to improve search for a variety of file types, including images, videos, and documents. The startup is also building a no-code platform that requires no programming knowledge, allowing creative teams to create automated workflows based on files in the system.

“We’re basically building Lego blocks that can run any type of business, with the ability to shade into their workflow, whether it’s a creative team today or a research and investment team in the future,” Fan said.