One of the most common use cases from new-age AI models is to power natural language searches to find files and other information faster. There are already several companies that connect different services to make data searchable. Now, a startup called Poly is launching a service that lets you dump all your files in one place and query them to find the right content.
At launch, free tier users will receive 100 GB of storage.
This is Poly’s second innings from a product perspective.
The company was founded in 2022 by founders Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young, who have since left the company. The startup, which was part of startup accelerator Y Combinator at the time, allowed users to create 3D assets using prompts.
Agarwal, a Microsoft researcher who worked on vision AI to help the visually impaired, said the company never expected the AI imaging and asset generation industry to explode and competitors to raise so much money so quickly. That’s when the team decided to change direction.
“We interviewed users and asked them what workflow pain points AI could solve. We found that one of the big unmet needs for users was file system organization. As a user, you have a lot of files on your computer and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. We wanted to solve that,” said Agarwal.
He said the startup will retire the previous version of Poly in 2023, go into stealth, and begin building a new cloud-based file organizer.
The company is now releasing the product to the general public after testing it in closed beta for several months. Poly is currently available on the web or Mac, with a Windows version coming soon. The company will begin enrolling users from its waiting list 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 a previous $3.9 million round raised in 2022.
“File systems are incredibly powerful and elegant, but most people forget that. Poly brings file systems to the center of the conversation. This tool is designed to use AI to help you think in a clearer way,” James Cham, partner at early-stage investment firm Bloomberg Beta, told TechCrunch.
Poly works like a cloud storage tool with AI-powered search. Currently, the tool supports text, PDFs, office documents, images, audio, video, and web files (URLs). You can also upload files to Poly, tag them, ask the AI assistant questions, and request that your files be summarized or translated. Additionally, this tool organizes your files and allows you to create new folders and rename files as needed.
Agarwal sees this as an upgrade to Google’s NotebookLM. NotebookLM is used by users to put files into projects, ask questions, and generate insights as audio and video. However, while Poly may be a great file organizer, it doesn’t have the ability to access the latest web knowledge or create audio or video.
The founder added that in the coming months, the tool plans to add features such as web search, support for creating stylized reports within the app, text and markdown editors, and the ability to add custom metadata. It also allows users to paste Google Docs links and use AI agents to perform calculations and analysis on spreadsheets.
Poly allows users to create shared drives, add files, and invite others to ask questions about them. This is useful if you are participating in a project with other users. The company also said it plans to add the ability for users to share individual files and folders directly.
Poly will be in direct competition with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive, which have their own search tools. In my experience using Poly’s tools for a few days, search worked better than Google’s tools. An added benefit is that you can simply paste the link of a YouTube video and it will generate a summary about that video.
There are many AI and search services on the market, but one of Poly’s biggest advantages is its 100 GB of storage for free users, which far exceeds the free tiers of other storage services. You can also choose to pay $10 per month for 2 TB of storage. There’s currently no ability to directly sync photos, but if the company builds functionality around it in the future, Poly could be a great alternative to Google Photos.
Although the tool provides ample storage, Agarwal said early testers were using it as working storage for projects.
“Our primary focus is on Gen AI-native creators and knowledge workers, people who are researching content and searching for files, such as service executives who want to gain insights from a large number of customer calls,” he said.
The company currently offers a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for using Poly within tools such as ChatGPT and Cursor. Although Poly doesn’t integrate directly with other syncing tools, Agarwal believes the app supports virtual file references, allowing you to import files from a variety of services.
