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, and Wing 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.
Poly acts like a cloud storage tool with AI-powered search. At the moment, the tool supports text, PDF, office docs, images, audio, video, and web files (URLs). You can upload files to Poly, tag them, ask the AI assistant questions about them, and even ask it to summarize or translate the files. Plus, the tool organizes your files for you and can create new folders or rename files, as needed.
Agarwal views it as an upgrade to Google’s NotebookLM, which people use to put files into a project, ask questions, and generate insights as audio or video. However, while Poly might be a better file organizer, it doesn’t have access to the latest web knowledge or the ability to create audio or video.
The founder added that, in the coming months, the tool will add more features, including web search, support for creating stylized reports within the app, a text and markdown editor, and the ability to add custom metadata. It will also allow users to paste Google Docs links and let people use AI agents to perform calculations and analysis on spreadsheets.
With Poly, users can create shared drives, add files, and invite others to ask questions about them, which could be useful when you are on a project with other people. The startup said it also plans to add a feature to let users directly share individual files and folders.
Poly will directly compete with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive, both of which have their own search tools. In my experience of using Poly’s tool for a few days, the search worked better than Google’s. Plus, there is an added benefit of just pasting the YouTube video’s link and generating a summary about it.
While there are plenty of AI and search offerings on the market, one of Poly’s biggest advantages is its 100GB of storage for free users, which is much more than the free tiers of other storage services. You can also choose to pay $10 a month for 1TB of storage. Right now, there is no direct photo sync, but in the future, if the company builds features around it, Poly can be a good Google Photos alternative.
Even though the tool offers substantial storage, Agarwal said that early testers have used it as a working storage for projects.
“Our primary focus is on Gen AI native creators and knowledge workers — people who are researching content or searching through their files. For instance, a service executive who wants to get insights out of many customer calls,” he said.
The company currently offers a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for you to use Poly within tools like ChatGPT or Cursor. While Poly doesn’t have direct integration with other tools for syncing, Agarwal believes that, as the app supports virtual file references, it can work on importing files from different services.
