Pool’s new app transforms screenshots into actionable data

For years, the Camera Roll on your phone has quietly served as a catch-all for life’s digital ephemera. Beyond preserving cherished memories, it has become a chaotic repository for everything from recipes and travel inspiration to funny tweets, product recommendations, and design ideas. Today, a new app called Pool launches with the goal of transforming that digital clutter into actionable data.

Getting started is straightforward: you grant Pool access to your photo library, and it automatically sorts your screenshots into personalized categories it calls “pools.” These pools are unique to you, built entirely around the products, places, and things you’ve saved over time.

Pool is part of a wave of startups rethinking bookmarking in the AI era. While competitors like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop focus on organizing links and images, Pool zeroes in on screenshots and uses AI to help users rediscover and act on content they intended to revisit. Once imported, the app can trace the original link behind a screenshot. If you captured a product you were considering, it connects directly to the retailer. If it was a recipe from Instagram, Pool pulls up the ingredients and instructions.

The idea emerged from a shared frustration. Co-founders Maxime Junique and Piet Terheyden both struggled with screenshots they could never find again. “It sounds pretty obvious, right now, when we say it, but it’s something that we do so naturally , you don’t notice it, necessarily,” Junique explained. After asking friends, they confirmed the pattern was widespread, from design inspiration to random ideas.

Pool actually began as the first product from Spinoff Studio, the founders’ product and design studio, roughly three years ago. The initial version was built in Lisbon over a couple of weeks while the founders lived out of a van, creating the landing page, website, and early build. However, they soon realized they needed revenue-generating products first, so they pivoted to B2B SaaS and shelved Pool. The studio later built other products, including CRM software Waitless, which was acquired last year.

What revived Pool was the maturation of AI. The core concept of making sense of personal, largely unstructured datasets suddenly felt achievable. “We were like, it seems like a perfect time to go after this idea,” Junique told TechCrunch. “And it also seemed to us like it’s a super untapped, unexplored dataset for AI. Everyone goes after emails, bank transactions, chat logs , all of those productivity-first datasets. Who is going after this really, deeply emotional dataset we all own?”

Pool also treats screenshots like memories, with some remaining relevant while others fade. For instance, a screenshot of an event ticket barcode may disappear after the event. But if you capture a flyer for an upcoming event, Pool’s AI agents can help you find where to buy tickets and link directly to the ticketing site. You can search or ask the built-in AI assistant to locate anything.

Looking ahead, the founders plan to spin this concept into a second, separate app that will function as a personal assistant. The app’s mascot, a little rubber duck you press and drag across the screen to enter Pool, will carry over into this new agentic AI product.

When we spoke, the founders were in Lisbon (no longer living in a van) and were heading to San Francisco in late May to meet with investors. The startup previously raised a pre-seed round of just over $2 million from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, Paris-based Source Ventures, and other angels, including Winston Du, Julian Blessin, and Thomas Ricouard.

Pool is available now as a free download on iOS.