Shade, a startup building AI-powered cloud storage for creative teams, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital.
The company has raised $20 million to date, with additional backing from General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary. It is developing a media management platform designed to help teams store, search, and collaborate on large volumes of video and creative assets.
What The Company Does
Founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove, Shade builds a cloud storage and media management system tailored for teams working with large and fast-growing video libraries, including agencies, sports media organisations, consumer brands, real estate firms, and podcasters.
The platform is designed to solve a growing problem: as AI increases the volume of content being produced, teams are accumulating larger media libraries that are increasingly difficult to organise and search using traditional storage tools.
Shade introduces a system that allows users to search video content using natural language queries. Its AI automatically tags and indexes content, enabling users to find specific moments within videos rather than just entire files. For example, a search query can return precise timestamps where a requested scene appears.
The system also transcribes videos and uses semantic search and facial recognition for identified individuals, allowing users to search based on meaning, spoken content, or visual elements.
In addition to search, Shade includes a streamable file system that allows users to access and work on files immediately without waiting for full downloads. This enables faster editing workflows, particularly for large media files, and supports offline or low-bandwidth usage through file pinning.
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Market context / industry background
Creative and marketing teams are producing more content than ever due to advances in generative AI tools. While content creation has become faster, the infrastructure for organising, retrieving, and collaborating on that content has not evolved at the same pace.
Traditional storage tools such as generic cloud drives were not designed for high-volume media workflows. As a result, teams often struggle with fragmented file systems, slow search processes, and inefficient collaboration across large media libraries.
This has created demand for purpose-built infrastructure that integrates storage, search, and workflow management into a single system designed specifically for media-heavy use cases.
Founder commentary
Brandon Fan, CEO of Shade, said the company was built out of frustration with existing tools that made it difficult to manage growing volumes of creative files. He described the product as a “single source of truth” for creative teams dealing with increasingly complex content libraries.
He also compared the shift in media management to the evolution of CRM systems decades ago, suggesting that as content scales, workflows around that content become just as important as the files themselves.
Investor Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures said that while many companies are adding AI search layers on top of existing storage systems, Shade rebuilt the underlying infrastructure from the ground up, integrating streaming, indexing, and collaboration into a single system. He noted that this architectural approach is more complex but results in a more functional product.
Growth plans / use of funds
Shade plans to expand its search capabilities across additional file types, including images and documents, alongside continued improvements in video search accuracy and performance.
The company is also developing a no-code workflow system that will allow teams to build automated processes based on their stored media without requiring technical expertise. This is intended to help organisations create custom workflows for content review, approval, and distribution.
Over time, Shade aims to expand beyond creative teams into broader enterprise use cases such as research and investment workflows, where large volumes of unstructured data need to be organised and analysed.
About Shade
Shade is a cloud-based media management platform founded by Brandon Fan and Emerson Dove. The company builds AI-powered storage, search, and collaboration tools designed for teams working with large volumes of video and creative content. Its platform enables natural language search, automated tagging, and real-time collaboration across media libraries, helping teams manage and utilise content more efficiently.
