Shade lands $14M to let creative teams search their video libraries in plain English

Source: TechCrunch

Overview

Creative and marketing teams often find that simple cloud storage solutions fall short when they need to sift through large numbers of files. The challenge is growing as AI accelerates content generation, resulting in more media files than ever.

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

Funding

The company announced 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, with participation from General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary.

Shade was founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove in 2024. The two, friends since high school, were motivated to build a solution after growing frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox for file searching.

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

“As you make more content, you need to be thinking more about the workflows around the content. I like to say it’s similar to CRMs 20 years ago, when we were thinking about how to organize all the information that we had around our contacts and in all of our companies,” – Brandon Fan

Product Features

Natural‑Language Search

Shade’s search is powered by auto‑tagging and can surface the exact moment in a video that matches a query. For example, searching for “a person holding a laptop in snow” returns all matching clips with timestamps.

The tool also automatically transcribes videos, enabling searches based on meaning, transcripts, and facial recognition for labeled individuals.

Streamable File System

Shade uses a “streamable” file system that lets users mount cloud storage to a local filesystem and begin working with a file almost immediately, without waiting for a full download. Files can be pinned for access in low‑bandwidth conditions, eliminating the typical wait associated with services like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Collaboration

• Leave feedback tied to a specific video timestamp.
• Attach files in comments to give direction.
• Create multiple links for the same asset with varying permissions.
• Set access‑based roles.

For final deliveries, teams can generate branded file collections with password protection and expiry dates.

Pricing

For small teams, Shade offers a $20 per seat, per month plan that includes:

• Unlimited drives
• Unlimited AI indexing
• 500 GB of active storage per seat

The plan supports up to 15 seats per workspace and up to 150 guests for collaboration.

Competition

Shade operates in a space with other AI‑powered storage and search startups, such as Poly and Memories.ai.

Outlook

Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, noted that while AI has accelerated content creation, managing those creations remains messy.

“Most companies are layering search on top of existing storage. Shade rebuilt the stack from first principles, spanning streaming, indexing, and collaboration in one system. That architectural approach is harder, but it is why the product actually works, not just as a bolt‑on feature,” – Keith Rabois

Rabois added that search is just the starting point; Shade could become a key tool for automating sharing and versioning.

In the coming months, Shade plans to:

• Expand search across images, videos, and documents.
• Launch a no‑code platform that lets creative teams build automated workflows without programming.

“We’re essentially building the Lego blocks that allow you to [operate] any type of business… whether that is, today, just creative teams, [or] in the future, research and investment teams,” – Brandon Fan