Shade raises $14M to simplify creative file management

On Wednesday, the nearly four-year-old startup Shade announced it has closed a $14 million funding round, bringing its total funding to $20 million. The round, which closed in March, was led by venture capital firms Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital. Other investors on the company’s cap table include General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary. Shade was founded in 2024 by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove.

The founders started the company after experiencing frustration with existing tools like Dropbox when searching for files. “We built it out of our frustration as creatives — [where we were contending with] stacks and stacks of hard drives and issues where we were using Dropbox drive frame and all of the tools under the sun … it was time to build one single source of truth,” Shade CEO Brandon Fan said. He compared the current state of creative content management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems 20 years ago, noting that as companies produce more content, they must focus on the workflows surrounding it.

To address this, Shade offers natural language search powered by auto-tagging, which automatically labels media files to identify exact moments in videos. It also uses a streamable file system that allows users to mount cloud storage to a local filesystem and work on files without waiting for full downloads, unlike standard cloud storage systems where users must wait for complete downloads before editing.

For small teams, the startup offers a pricing plan with the following specifications:

• A cost of $20 per seat per month
• 500GB of active storage per seat
• Support for up to 15 seats per workspace
• Support for up to 150 guests for collaboration

In the coming months, Shade plans to improve search across different file types and build a no-code platform—meaning a system requiring no programming knowledge—for automated workflows. Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, noted that most companies merely layer search on top of existing storage. He stated that Shade rebuilt the stack from first principles across streaming, indexing, and collaboration, which makes the product work as a complete system rather than a bolt-on feature. Rabois added that Shade could become a key tool for automating sharing and versioning.

Why it matters

Shade is addressing the growing difficulty creative and marketing teams face in managing and searching large volumes of media files generated by AI, positioning itself as a “single source of truth” for creative workflows.