Shutdown
Jan 2023Poly shut down its original 3D asset-generation product in 2023 and pivoted to the current cloud file-browser product.
SourceCompany research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Overview
Poly is a Y Combinator S22 startup building an AI-native cloud file browser / personal cloud storage app that replaces Finder/File Explorer with multimodal search, summarization, tagging, sharing, and agentic file actions.
Primary product
Intelligent cloud file browser for personal files and media
Founded
2022
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
1-10 employees
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Sub-industry
Cloud file storage and AI search
Offices
San Francisco, California, United States
Santa Monica, California, United States
Business model
Freemium subscription SaaS
Consumer cloud storage
AI productivity software
Funding
Stage
Seed
Total raised
$16M
Latest round
Seed · Nov 2025
Latest amount
$8M
People & investors
Founders
Co-founder
Work & culture
Small-team, high-conviction, consensus-oriented culture with a very rigorous and transparent interview process, take-home exercises, deep technical grilling, and strong emphasis on product craftsmanship and engineering depth.
Compensation
YC job postings show salary bands around $150K-$350K and equity around 0.25%-5.00%, depending on role. Some roles explicitly require being in-person 5 days a week in SoMa, San Francisco.
Benefits
Competitive salary
Equity
Paid fly-out / short onsite trial period for final-stage candidates
Product & market
Pricing
Freemium subscription with storage tiers: free 100GB, paid 2TB at $10/month, plus 1¢/GB/month over 2TB
Differentiators
- —Multimodal semantic search across text, PDFs, docs, images, audio, video, code, and URLs
- —Agentic actions that can create, edit, summarize, research, rename, move, tag, and organize files
- —Desktop sync plus cloud storage
- —Privacy-first encryption and 'hide from AI' controls
- —Public sharing and shared drives
- —Search by phrase, file similarity, color, face, and other features
Technology
Figma
Python
Kubernetes
Terraform
React
WebRTC
GitHub
Nuxt 3
Rust
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
PyTorch
NumPy
Customers
Knowledge workers managing large file libraries
Researchers and students working with long documents and mixed media
GenAI-native creators and people organizing design/media assets
Teams that need searchable shared drives and public sharing
Service professionals analyzing customer calls and other media
Competitors
Dropbox
Google Drive
Finder/File Explorer
NotebookLM
Perplexity
Scale & contact
Estimated revenue
Under $1M annually; LinkedIn estimates revenue around $400K
Estimated monthly visits
65.7K
Traffic estimate as of Jul 2026
Signals & risks
Latest news
TechCrunch · Nov 2025
Launch article for the current Poly product; covers the pivot from the earlier 3D asset business, the AI file browser product, pricing, supported platforms, and the $8M seed round led by Felicis.
GlobeNewswire / Poly · Nov 2025
Company press release announcing the seed round, product positioning, Polyembed-v1, and leadership team including Abhay Agarwal, Samuel Lo, and Alexandre Seo.
NextView Ventures · Nov 2025
Investor blog explaining why NextView backed Poly and describing the product as an intelligent cloud file browser that syncs local files to the cloud.
Hacker News · Nov 2025
Founder's launch post detailing the product, pricing, public drives, multimodal search, and the 2023 shutdown/pivot from the earlier image-generation company.
TechCrunch · Dec 2022
Earlier coverage of Poly's original 3D asset-generation product and its $3.9M seed round.
Jobs and careers at Poly
0 jobs at Poly
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