YC-Backed Poly Launches AI-Powered Cloud File Storage

Finding the right file in a cluttered digital workspace can be a major headache for professionals and creators. Poly, a startup backed by Y Combinator, has launched an AI-powered cloud storage platform designed to solve this exact problem. The service encourages users to consolidate their files into one intelligent repository, where a natural language AI assistant helps them search, organize, and interact with their content in entirely new ways. To sweeten the deal, the platform offers a generous 100GB of storage on its free tier, a significant amount compared to other services.

This launch represents a strategic pivot for the company. Founded in 2022 by Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young, Poly initially focused on generating 3D assets from text prompts. Young has since departed. Agarwal, a Microsoft research fellow with a background in vision AI, explained that the team quickly realized the AI image generation space was becoming intensely competitive. They decided to shift direction after speaking with users about their most pressing workflow challenges.

“We discovered a major, unmet need was simply organizing and finding files,” Agarwal stated. “Everyone has a mountain of files on their computer, and locating the right one is difficult. We decided to build a solution for that.” The company shut down the original Poly product in 2023, entered a stealth development phase, and began constructing the new cloud-based file organizer. After several months of closed beta testing, the product is now publicly available on web and Mac, with a Windows version slated for release soon.

Poly functions as a cloud storage tool supercharged with AI. It supports a wide array of file types, including text documents, PDFs, office files, images, audio, video, and web URLs. Users can upload their files, tag them, and then query the AI assistant. The assistant can answer specific questions about the content, provide summaries, or even translate documents. Furthermore, it can proactively organize files by creating new folders or renaming items as needed.

The startup has secured $8 million in a seed funding round led by Felicis. Other participants included Bloomberg Beta, NextView, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, and Wing Ventures. This total incorporates a previous $3.9 million round raised back in 2022.

James Cham, a partner at Bloomberg Beta, commented on the vision, stating, “File systems are powerful and elegant, but most people have forgotten about them. Poly is bringing file systems back to the center of interaction. The tool is designed to let you use AI to think more clearly.”

Agarwal positions Poly as an evolution of tools like Google’s NotebookLM. While Poly excels as a sophisticated file organizer, it currently lacks access to real-time web knowledge and cannot generate audio or video content. However, the roadmap is ambitious. In the coming months, the company plans to introduce web search capabilities, an in-app tool for creating stylized reports, a built-in text and markdown editor, and support for custom metadata. Future updates will also allow users to paste Google Docs links and employ AI agents to perform calculations on spreadsheet data.

Collaboration is another key focus. Users can create shared drives, add files, and invite team members to ask the AI questions about the shared content, which is invaluable for group projects. The startup also intends to add direct sharing for individual files and folders.

Poly enters a competitive landscape dominated by giants like Dropbox and Google Drive. In early testing, Poly’s AI search has demonstrated impressive performance, often returning more relevant results than competing tools. A standout feature is the ability to simply paste a YouTube URL and have the AI generate a concise summary of the video’s content.

Beyond its intelligent search, Poly’s 100GB free storage offering is a powerful differentiator, providing far more space than the free tiers of most competitors. A paid plan, costing $10 per month, unlocks 1TB of storage. Although direct photo synchronization is not yet available, future development in this area could position Poly as a compelling alternative to Google Photos.

Agarwal noted that early testers are already using Poly as active working storage for their projects. “We are primarily targeting Gen AI native creators and knowledge workers, individuals who are constantly researching or sifting through files,” he said. “Think of a service executive who needs to extract insights from dozens of customer call recordings.”

For now, Poly offers a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, enabling its use within other AI environments like ChatGPT or Cursor. While direct syncing integrations with other apps are not yet available, Agarwal believes the platform’s support for virtual file references will allow it to efficiently import files from various external services in the future.

(Source: TechCrunch)