Shade wins $14 million and lets its creative team search its video library in plain English

A simple cloud storage solution is often not enough for creative and marketing teams. These teams have to sift through tons of files to find what they’re looking for. The problem is getting worse. As AI accelerates content generation, more media files are required than ever before, making the task more complex.

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

The company announced Wednesday that it closed a $14 million funding round in March led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital. The nearly four-year-old startup has raised a total of $20 million, and its cap table also includes General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary.

Shade was founded in 2024 by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove. The two had been friends since high school. Frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox for finding files, they decided to build something together.

“We built this out of frustration as creators. [where we were contending with] The problem of stacking hard drives and having Dropbox drive frames and every tool under the sun…it’s time to build a single source of truth,” said Huang.

He believes Shade occupies an interesting niche as a creative file storage system that businesses can build workflows around.

“As you create more content, you have to think more about the workflow around that content. I like to say it’s similar to CRM 20 years ago, where you were thinking about how to organize all your contacts and information across your company,” he said.

Shade exhibits two characteristics. First, it provides natural language search with automatic tagging. The company says this search doesn’t just bring up a specific video, it pinpoints the exact moment in the video where a scene matching the search query occurs. For example, if a user searches for “person holding a laptop in the snow,” the system will display all matching clips with timestamps.

This tool also automatically transcribes videos for easier searching. Users can search based on meaning, transcripts, and facial recognition for labeled individuals.

Second, Shade uses a “streamable” file system. This allows you to mount cloud storage to your local file system and start working with files almost immediately, without having to wait for the files to fully download first. Users can also pin files so that they can be accessed even in low-bandwidth situations. Storage systems like Google Drive and Dropbox typically require you to wait until large files have finished downloading before you can edit them. Shade’s streamable system lets you get started quickly.

Shade makes it easy for your team to collaborate with storage and search, as well as the ability to leave feedback tied to videos at specific timestamps. You can also provide instructions by attaching files to your comments. Shade allows teams to create multiple links to the same asset with varying permissions and allows for access-based roles.

For final deliveries to clients, teams can create branded file collections 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 500 GB of active storage per seat. This plan supports up to 15 seats and collaboration for up to 150 guests per workspace.

Shades aren’t the only ones in this space. Startups like Poly and Memories.ai are also working on AI-powered file storage and search for large amounts of files.

Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, says that while AI is accelerating content creation, managing that creation remains cumbersome.

“Most enterprises layer search on top of their existing storage. Shade has rebuilt the stack from first principles to span streaming, indexing, and collaboration in one system. Its architectural approach is more challenging, but that’s why this product really works, and not just as a bolt-on feature,” Rabois said in an email.

He added that while search is a starting point, Shade can be an important tool for automating sharing and version control.

In the coming months, Shade will improve search across a variety of file types, including images, videos, and documents. The startup is also building a no-code platform (i.e. one that doesn’t require programming knowledge) that allows creative teams to create automated workflows based on files in the system.

“We are essentially building Lego blocks that allow us to: [operate] No matter what type of business you are in, today even just your creative team can apply shadows to your workflow. [or] In the future, the research team and the investment team will work together,” Huang said.