The new Pool app turns your screenshots into something useful

For many years, your phone’s camera roll has served dual purposes. In addition to helping you relive special moments, it also served as an archive for all kinds of things you find online, like recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations, and more. Today, a new app called Pool is here to help you finally make sense of this digital chaos.

To get started using Pool, simply give it permission to access your photos, which are moved into categories called “Collections.” The collections created in the app are based entirely on products, places or things you’ve saved over time, making them personalized to you.

The app is one of many bookmarks that have been reinvented in the age of artificial intelligence. Startups like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop help users organize links, images, or other saved content, but Pool specifically focuses on screenshots and then uses AI to help users rediscover and act on things they plan to come back to later.

Once imported, Pool is able to track down the original link associated with a particular screenshot. For example, if the screenshot is of a product you’re thinking about purchasing, it will link to the retailer’s website. If it’s a recipe you saw on Instagram, it can pull up the ingredients and instructions the creator shared. And so on.

Maxim Gonik, co-founder of Pool, explained that the idea came about because he and his co-founder Piet Terheiden faced the same problem: They photographed things they wanted to remember, but then couldn’t find them again.

“It seems so obvious, in the moment, when we say it, but it’s something we do naturally — you don’t necessarily notice,” Gonick said. The founders, who met years ago in a coworking space, asked their friends about the issue. The friends agreed that they often screenshot and forget things too, like design ideas or other types of inspiration.

The app was actually the first product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, the founders’ product and design studio, about three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over the course of two weeks while the founders lived out of a van, setting up the landing page, website and initial build. But they quickly realized they needed to build some money-making products first, so they focused on B2B SaaS and shelved Pool.

The studio has continued to build other products, including customer relationship management software Waitless, which it acquired last year.

What brought Paul back to life was the maturity of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, her basic idea of ​​making sense of largely unstructured personal data sets seemed possible.

“We felt like this was the perfect time to pursue this idea,” Gonick told TechCrunch. “It also seemed to us that it was an untapped and unexplored data set for AI. Everyone is going after emails, banking transactions, chat logs — all data sets that prioritize productivity. Who is going after this deep emotional data set that we all have?”

Pool also treats your screenshots like memories, meaning some are more important in the moment, while others disappear over time.

For example, if you photograph the barcode on an event ticket, it may disappear later after the event. Meanwhile, if you take a screenshot of an Instagram post about an upcoming event, Pool’s AI agents can help you find where to buy tickets and link to the ticket site.

To find things in Pool, you can search or ask for help from the built-in AI assistant.

Next, the founders plan to take this concept into a second, separate app that acts as a personal assistant of sorts. The Pool mascot — the little rubber duck that you tap and drag across the screen to enter the Pool at launch — will become part of the branding for this agent AI app they’re planning.

The founders were in Lisbon when we chatted, and they were no longer in a truck! — but he headed to San Francisco in late May to meet with investors. The startup previously raised a seed round worth just over $2 million from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, Paris-based Source Ventures, and other angel investors, including Winston Du, Julian Blessin and Thomas Ricouard.

Pool is now available to download for free on iOS.