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One of the most popular use cases emerging from new-age AI models is to enhance natural language searches and find files and other information faster and faster. There are already many companies that allow you to do this Calls various Services To search through the data. Now, called startup Polly It launches 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 offers 100GB of storage space to users in its free tier.
This is Polly’s second half from a product perspective.
The company was founded by founders Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young in 2022. Young has since left the company. At that time, the startup, which participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator, allowed Users to create 3D assets using prompts.
Agarwal, a research fellow at Microsoft who has worked on visual AI to help the visually impaired, said the company did not expect that the image and asset generation industry using AI would explode and that competitors would raise large sums of money so quickly. That’s when the team decided to pivot.
“We interviewed our users and asked them about pain points in their workflow that could be solved by AI. It turns out that one of the big unmet needs of users is organizing their file system. As a user, you have a lot of files on your computer, and it’s hard to find things. We wanted to solve this problem,” Agarwal said.
He said the startup discontinued the previous version of Poly in 2023, went stealthy, and began creating the new cloud-based file organizer.
The company is now launching the product to 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 begin onboarding 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, and Wing Ventures. This includes the previous $3.9 million round raised in 2022.
“File systems are incredibly powerful and elegant, but most people have forgotten about them. Poly brings file systems as a center of interaction. The tool is designed in a way that allows you to use artificial intelligence to think in a more clear way,” said James Cham, partner at early-stage investment firm Bloomberg Beta TechCrunch said.
Poly works as a cloud storage tool with AI-powered search. Currently, the tool supports text, PDF files, Office documents, 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. Additionally, the tool organizes your files for you and can create new folders or rename files as needed.
Agarwal sees it as an upgrade to Google’s NotebookLM, which people use to project files, ask questions, and generate insights in audio or video form. However, while Poly may 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 allow people to 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 can be useful when you’re on a project with other people. The startup said it also plans to add a feature to allow users to share individual files and folders directly.
Poly will compete directly with companies like Dropbox and Google Drive, both of which have their own search tools. In my experience using Poly for a few days, search worked better than Google. Additionally, there is the added benefit of pasting the YouTube video link and creating a summary of it.
Although there are plenty of AI and search offerings on the market, one of Poly’s biggest advantages is its 100GB storage capacity for free users, which is far more than the free tiers of other storage services. You can also choose to pay $10 per month for 1TB of storage space. Right now, there’s no direct photo syncing, but in the future, if the company builds features around it, Poly could do it. A good alternative to Google Photos.
Although the tool offers a lot of storage space, Agarwal said early testers used it as a working repository for projects.
“Our primary focus is on native creators and knowledge workers from the AI generation – people who search through content or dig through their files. For example, a service manager who wants to get insights from 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. Although Poly doesn’t have direct integration with other sync tools, Agarwal believes that since the app supports virtual file references, it can work on importing files from different services.