Shade cloud storage raises $14M to tackle creative teams’ media overload
Shade raises $14M to scale its AI-powered cloud storage for creative teams, offering searchable video timestamps, streamable files, and collaboration tools.
Shade closes $14 million round led by Khosla Ventures
Shade, a New York startup building cloud storage for creative teams, announced a $14 million financing round in March to accelerate product development and customer growth. The round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Construct Capital and Bling Capital, bringing the company’s total raised to roughly $20 million. Founders Brandon Fan (CEO) and Emerson Dove (CTO) launched Shade in 2024 after confronting the limitations of existing file-storage tools while working on creative projects.
Founders frame Shade as a single source of truth for media
Fan and Dove designed Shade to replace the patchwork of hard drives and multiple cloud tools that creative teams often juggle. The founders describe the product as a platform companies can build workflows around rather than a simple repository for assets. Fan likened the effort to how CRM systems organized contact data decades ago, arguing that media workflows now require a similarly foundational approach.
AI search surfaces exact moments inside videos
Shade’s standout capability is a natural-language search layer that auto-tags assets and pinpoints the precise moment in a video where matching content appears. The system combines automatic transcription, semantic search and labeled facial recognition so teams can search by meaning, text or individuals and jump to matching timestamps. That functionality is intended to speed tasks such as locating a B‑roll moment, extracting clips for social edits, or assembling reference footage without manual scrubbing.
Streamable filesystem lets teams work before download completes
A second differentiator is Shade’s streamable file system, which mounts cloud storage to a local filesystem and enables immediate interaction with large media files. Rather than waiting for a full download, users can begin editing or previewing content while the file streams, and they can pin critical files for offline or low-bandwidth access. The approach aims to eliminate the typical delay associated with large video and audio files on conventional services.
Collaboration and secure delivery features for client workflows
Shade also layers review and delivery tools on top of storage, allowing teams to attach comments and files to specific timestamps and create multiple links to the same asset with customized permissions. Admins can assign access-based roles and set password protection or expiry dates on branded collections intended for client handoffs. Those features are positioned to simplify iterative creative review and final deliveries without forcing teams to move assets between separate systems.
Pricing, target customers and competitive landscape
The company markets a $20 per seat, per month plan that includes unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing and 500GB of active storage per seat, with workspaces capped at 15 paid seats and up to 150 guests. Shade is pitching agencies, sports-media operations, consumer brands, real estate firms and podcasters that produce and manage high volumes of visual and audio content. The startup enters a competitive space that includes other AI-enabled storage and search vendors such as Poly and Memories.ai, with investors arguing Shade’s architecture is more deeply integrated than bolt-on search layers.
Investors back architectural approach and future automation
Khosla Ventures’ managing director Keith Rabois framed the investment around Shade’s decision to rebuild the storage and search stack from first principles rather than layering search on top of legacy systems. Backers see the search capability as a foundation that could evolve into automated sharing, versioning and downstream workflows. With fresh capital, Shade plans to refine cross-file-type search and to build a no-code automation layer so non-technical teams can create file-driven workflows.
Shade’s move to combine semantic search, streaming access and collaboration tools reflects growing pressure on creative teams dealing with a surge in media files, a trend investors say has been amplified by AI-driven content production. If Shade can execute on its roadmap and win customers in targeted verticals, it could become a central tool for teams seeking to manage, find and deliver media at scale.
