One of the most common use cases to have come out of new-age AI models is to power natural language search and find files and other information quicker and faster. There are already several companies that allow you to connect different services to search through data. Now, a startup called Poly is launching a service that encourages you to dump all your files into one place so you can query them to find the right content.
At launch, it’s giving 100GB of storage to users on its free tier.
This is Poly’s second inning from a product perspective.
The company was started by founders Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young in 2022. Young has since left the company. At that time, the startup, which had participated in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, allowed users to create 3D assets using prompts.
Agarwal, who is a research fellow at Microsoft and worked on vision AI to help the visually impaired, said the company didn’t predict that the AI image and asset generation industry would blow up and competitors would raise large sums rapidly. That’s when the team decided to pivot.
“We interviewed our users and asked them what the pain points of their workflows were that could be solved by AI. Turned out that one big unmet need for users was organizing their file system. As a user, you have a lot of files on your computer, and it is hard to find stuff. We wanted to solve for that,” Agarwal said.
He said that the startup shut down the previous iteration of Poly in 2023, went into stealth, and started building the new cloud-based file organizer.
The company is now launching the product for the public after testing it in closed beta for a few months. Currently, you can use Poly on the web or Mac, with a Windows version coming soon. The company will start onboarding users from its waitlist starting today.
Poly has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Felicis, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, NextView, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, Wing Ventures, and MVP Ventures. This includes the prior $3.9 million round raised in 2022.
“File systems are incredibly powerful and elegant, but most people have forgotten about them. Poly is bringing file systems as the center of interaction. The tool is designed in a way that allows you to use AI to think in a clearer way,” James Cham, a partner at the early-stage investment firm Bloomberg Beta told TechCrunch.
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