Creative and marketing teams are drowning in footage. From agencies and sports broadcasters to podcasters and real estate marketers, the volume of video and audio they generate has exploded, and traditional cloud storage tools were never built to keep up. Finding a single shot in a sea of hard drives and shared folders can still take hours.

New York–based startup Shade is betting that artificial intelligence can turn that chaos into a searchable library. The company has raised $14 million in new funding, led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital, bringing its total capital raised to $20 million. Other backers include General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary.

Shade was founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove, longtime friends who set out to fix a problem they had lived themselves: the pain of hunting through Dropbox folders and physical drives for the right clip. Fan describes Shade as a “single source of truth” for creative assets, around which entire workflows can be built.

At the core of Shade’s pitch is natural language search. The platform automatically analyzes and tags media so users can type a plain-English query like “a person holding a laptop in snow” and jump directly to the exact moments in videos where that scene appears. Shade also generates transcripts, enabling search by dialogue or meaning, and supports facial recognition for labeled individuals.

Under the hood, Shade has rebuilt storage itself. Its “streamable” file system lets users mount cloud drives to their local machines and begin working on large files almost instantly, instead of waiting for full downloads as with many legacy services. Frequently used files can be pinned for reliable access in low-bandwidth environments.

Collaboration features are layered on top of this infrastructure. Teams can leave frame-accurate comments tied to timestamps, attach reference files inside threads, and share assets through multiple links with granular permissions, passwords, and expiry dates. Shade positions this as a full workflow hub, not just a smarter folder.

For smaller teams, Shade offers a per-seat subscription that includes unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing, and a generous allocation of active storage, along with support for guests and collaborators.

Investors argue that Shade’s decision to rebuild storage, indexing, and collaboration as a single system gives it an edge over incumbents that simply bolt AI search onto existing products. The company is now working to extend its search across images and documents and to launch a no-code automation layer, aiming to let any team design workflows that trigger off the content inside their files.