Shade received $14 million to allow creative teams to search their video libraries in plain English

For creative and marketing teams, a simple cloud storage solution is often not enough. These teams need to sift through large numbers of files to find what they are looking for. And the problem is getting worse: AI is speeding up the content creation process, which means there are more media files than ever before, making the task more difficult.

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 podcast providers to easily store and search 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, with General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contary also on the cap table.

Shade was founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove in 2024. The two have been friends since high school. They decided to build something together after becoming frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox when it came to searching for files.

“We built it out of our frustration as creators – [where we were contending with] “Stacks and stacks of hard drives and issues where we were using the Dropbox drive framework and all the tools under the sun…it was time to build a single source of truth,” Fan said.

He sees Shade as an interesting niche as a creative file storage system that companies can build workflows around.

“As you create more content, you have to think more about the workflow around the content,” he said. “I would say it’s similar to the CRM of 20 years ago, when we were thinking about how to organize all the information we had around our contacts and across our companies.”

The shadow indicates two distinct features. First, it offers natural language search powered by automatic tagging. This search not only returns a specific video, but identifies the exact moment in the video when a scene that matches the search query occurs, the startup said. For example, users can search for “person carrying laptop in snow,” and the system will display all matching clips with timestamps.

The tool also automatically transcribes videos to make searching easier. Users can search based on meaning, text and facial recognition of categorized individuals.

Second, Shade uses a “streamable” file system that lets you mount your cloud storage to your local file system and start working with the 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.

In addition to storing and searching, Shade makes it easier for teams to collaborate — with the ability to leave comments linked to a video at a specific timestamp. They can also attach files in comments to give guidance. Shade allows teams to create multiple links to the same assets with different permissions, and teams can assign access-based roles.

For final deliveries to customers, teams can create branded file sets 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 space per seat. The plan supports up to 15 seats per workspace and up to 150 guests for collaboration.

The shadow is not alone in this space. Startups like Poly and Memories.ai are also working on AI-powered file storage and searching of large numbers of files.

Although AI has sped up the content creation process, managing those creations is still messy, said Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures.

“Most companies layer search on top of existing storage,” Rabois said via email. “Shade rebuilt the stack from first principles, including streaming, indexing, and collaboration in a single system. This architectural approach is trickier, but that’s why the product actually works, not just as a proven feature.”

He added that while search is the starting point, Shade can become a key tool for automating engagement and release.

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

“We basically build Lego blocks that allow you to do that [operate] In any type of business, you have that ability to apply shadow to your workflow, whether it’s just creative teams today, [or] “In the future, research and investment teams,” Fan said.