Blog written by Brandon Fan and Emerson Dove, co-founders of Shade, published April 21, 2026

File systems and file storage have largely stayed the same in the last 5-10 years.Creative teams deal with files scattered across storage silos, DAMs, review tools, archive drives – none of them talking to each other. You lose hours just finding the right version of something, shuttling files between systems, or babysitting uploads.

At Shade, we believe that creatives are spending more time managing files than actually being creative, and our mission is to win back creative’s time. We think all creative work can be done through one single source of truth from ingestion to rough cut to delivery to archive and all the workflows in between. Our latest round of funding of $14M announced today, will help us make that happen.

Today, we’re excited to announce our $14M funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital, bringing our total funding to $20M. As part of the round, we’re incredibly excited for Keith Rabois to be a part of our board and shape the direction and future of our company. We’re also grateful to our existing set of investors – General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary – for believing in us early. Our goal from the outset has been to bring together a set of investors who are forward-thinking, rigorous, and have a history of operating and investing in durable companies. More importantly, to bring an investor set that knows the pain points of the customers. We believe we’ve continued to achieve that excellence with our latest round.

Every team runs on its system of record. Sales lives in HubSpot and Salesforce, operations in Airtable, product in Linear and ClickUp. File systems should be no different – and arguably matter more. As companies pour investment into creative, content, and AI across every department, the absence of a single source of truth for storing, accessing, indexing, archiving, and processing files becomes a mess waiting to collapse. Everyone’s building the AI brain, but nobody’s building the memory. Shade is that system of record for files. And with our funding, we can continue to invest into our streamable file system, our AI search, our review platform, and our Shade 3.0 vision with the launch of automations and custom objects.

The Future
Shade today, creates one unified place for all workflows. It’s a single storage platform where you can access, search, review, and archive all media in one platform. You can stream 50GB+ files directly into your NLE without downloads or waiting on transfers, while AI automatically tags, transcribes, and analyzes footage during ingest so you can find “CEO soundbite about sustainability” in seconds instead of scrubbing through hours of footage. Native review tools let you collaborate with your team, syncing comments directly to NLE timelines and keeping all feedback in one place, all within centralized storage and asset management that replaces six or seven legacy tools.

The results speak for themselves. We’ve ingested over 60 million assets in the last 9 months while working with some of the largest brands, agencies, and sports companies in the world.

But we’re not stopping there. With the new funding, we are pouring investment into 4 core areas:

Building the best user experience possible
We recognize the importance of building a file system that people love to use on a regular basis. If this is the tool that all data flows through, it is the place that people must love to work in, share from, and leverage on a daily basis. This is why we’re pouring more resources into a unified design system, better user interactions, and a beautiful user experience.

Building the smartest search engine for any modality
We’ve always prided ourselves on being an incredibly forward thinking search company. But we aren’t going to stop at launching semantic search with custom metadata. With the new funding, we are doubling down on building search that works across all modalities, images, videos, and text, and diving deeper into direct moment detection and time-specific metadata. We’re diving deeper into how AI can help manage, sort, organize and save time labeling and updating metadata

The file system that represents your business
Today file systems largely focus on just storing files, or just doing review, or just being a MAM. We want to represent your business, whether that’s events, sports teams, clients, projects, or anything, having the flexibility to connect these “objects” to the way you store your files and to create no-code workflows that enable you to automate the busy work is something we’re investing into. We’re not just building a system of record; we’re building a system of action.

The most extensible file system
For workflows to be truly integrated and connected, we need Shade to be the most extensible platform there can be. We’re doubling down on developer experience, and, no ETA yet, but our Shade App Store

As we enter this next chapter, we’d love your ideas and feedback – that’s what drives us at Shade. Reach out anytime, join one of our meetups and events around the world, or swing by NAB Vegas for a sneak peek at some of these new features.

We’re excited for you to be a part of this journey with us and we’re just getting started.