Shade’s single source of file system truth for creatives

Startup Shade has raised $14 million to dominate entertainment and media file sharing, streaming and search

Its software lets entertainment and media (E&M) creative workers access all multi-source files in one place with part-file streaming, AI-generated metadata, and natural language search.

Shade was founded in New York in 2022 by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove. They have built a cloud-based virtual file system, ShadeFS, which is represented as a cloud drive which users mount from Linux, MacOS (Intel and Apple silicon). 

Fan blogs: “Shade today, creates one unified place for all workflows. It’s a single storage platform where you can access, search, review, and archive all media in one platform. You can stream 50GB+ files directly into your NLE (non-linear editing) without downloads or waiting on transfers, while AI automatically tags, transcribes, and analyzes footage during ingest so you can find "CEO soundbite about sustainability" in seconds instead of scrubbing through hours of footage. Native review tools let you collaborate with your team, syncing comments directly to NLE timelines and keeping all feedback in one place, all within centralized storage and asset management that replaces six or seven legacy tools.”

The $14 million funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital, bringing total funding to $20 million. Crunchbase lists a $4.2 million seed round in January 2024 and we think there may have been $1.8 million in initial funding from angel investors before that. The two founders were involved in creating media products and grew frustrated wth Dropbox file sharing limitations.

Shade says its SW natively integrates with the tools that Entertainment and Media (E&M) creatives use, such as Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Unreal Engine, Blender and Unity. It is meant to replace basic cloud file sharing services like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. But, as we see it, Shade also, in the E&M market, competes with cloud file services players like CTERA, Egnyte, Nasuni and Panzura, media file streaming suppliers such as Lucid Link and Suite Studios, as well as distributed file managers and orchestrators like Arcitecta, with its MediaFlux, and Hammerspace. Shade’s pitch is that its software is designed for the exact way E&M creatives work. 

Shade FS can be accessed via browser or via local desktop app which lists drives of source data, which you then mount and use as if they were local files. It streams the particular parts of large media files which you are accessing rather than importing the whole source file. Shade FS caches imported files and file segments for faster access. Whole files can be pinned so that they are copied to the user’s location for faster access as well.

The software’s AI-powered auto-tagging and LLM natural language interface means users with stacks and stack  of video files can ask it to look for “a motorcycle rider” or "CEO soundbite about sustainability,” and it will present a list of all the video clips that include it plus their timestamps to enable fast access to each clip.

Media team collaboration is supported with settable access level rights and sharable comments at precise points in a video.

Dozens and dozens of media software tool file formats are supported. Shade is firmly focussed on the E&M market and not other file sharing and collaboration markets such as the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry. In theory we think it could enter them but would need the same deep software tool ecosystem integration and workflow familiarity that it has in the E&M niche.

The new funding will support four development areas: 

• A unified design system, better user interactions, and a beautiful user experience,
• Building search that works across all modalities, images, videos, and text, and diving deeper into direct moment detection and time-specific metadata,
• Making a file system that represent a customer’s business, whether that’s events, sports teams, clients, projects, and having the flexibility to connect these “objects” to the way they store their files and to create no-code workflows for automation,
• Extending Shade FS further for developers and having a ShadeApp Store.

Find out more about Shade FS through Shade’s academy webpages.