Shadow has raised $14M to allow creative teams to search their video libraries in plain English

For production and sales teams, a simple cloud storage solution often falls short. These groups have to sift through many files to find what they are looking for. The problem is getting worse: AI is speeding up content output, which means more video files than ever before, making the process even more difficult.

Founders in New York called Shadow is creating a cloud storage platform designed for organizations, media groups, consumers, real estate companies, and podcasters to easily store and search their media files.

The company announced Wednesday that it closed a $14 million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital in March. In nearly four years the startup has raised $20 million in total, with General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary also on its table.

Shade was founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove in 2024. The two had been friends since high school. He decided to build something after being frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox when it came to file search.

“We created this out of frustration as developers – (where we struggled with) stacks and hard drives and issues where we were using Dropbox drive frame and all the tools under the sun… it was time to build a single source of truth,” Fan said.

He sees Shade having an interesting niche as a file storage solution that companies can use to create workflows.

“When you create information, you have to think deeply about the workflow around the content. I like to say that it is similar to CRMs 20 years ago, when we were thinking about how to organize the information that we had around our contacts and throughout our companies,” he said.

The shadow refers to two different things. First, it provides natural language search with the help of automatic tagging. The developer said that this search doesn’t just show another video – it shows the exact moment in the video where the image that matches the search occurs. For example, users can search for “person with laptop in snow,” and the system will display all matching videos with time stamps.

The tool also automatically records videos for easy search. Users can search based on meaning, text, and face recognition for characters.

Second, Shade uses a “portable” file system that allows you to upload your cloud storage to your file location and start working with the file immediately, without waiting for it to be downloaded first. Users can also print files to access them even if they are at a very low level. Usually, with storage systems like Google Drive or Dropbox, you have to wait for a large file to download before you can edit it. Shade’s portable system lets you get started right away.

Beyond storage and search, Shade makes it easier for teams to work together – with the ability to leave comments tied to a video at a specific time. They can also attach files in comments to provide instructions. Shade allows groups to create multiple links to the same resource with different permissions, and groups can set roles based on access.

For final delivery to customers, teams can create a collection of files with passwords and expiration dates.

For smaller teams, Shade offers a $20 per seat, monthly plan that includes unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing, and 500GB of storage per seat. The system supports up to 15 seats per workstation and up to 150 guests to join.

Mthunzi is not alone in this place. Founders like Poly are Memories.ai they are also working on AI-powered file storage and multi-file searching.

Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, said that while AI has helped create things, managing those creations remains a challenge.

“Many companies are putting research on top of existing storage. Shadow rebuilt the stack from the first principles, moving, printing, and collaboration in one system. That construction method is difficult, but because the product works, not as a bolt form,” said Rabois by email.

He added that while search is the starting point, Shade can be an important tool for sharing and editing.

In the coming months, Shade plans to improve its search for a variety of file types, including images, videos, and text. The startup is also building a code-free platform — meaning no programming knowledge — to allow development teams to create custom workflows based on existing files in the system.

“We are building Lego blocks that allow you (to do) any kind of business, you have the ability to use shadow in your movement, whether today, only production teams, (or) in the future, research and investment teams,” said Fan.