NAB Show 2026: Shade Raises $14M to Build The Intelligent File System for Creative Teams
A modern solution for a new era
By Philippe Nicolas | April 28, 2026 at 2:01 pmBlog written by Brandon Fan and Emerson Dove, co-founders of Shade, published April 21, 2026
File systems and file storage have largely stayed the same in the last 5-10 years.
Creative teams deal with files scattered across storage silos, DAMs, review tools, archive drives – none of them talking to each other. You lose hours just finding the right version of something, shuttling files between systems, or babysitting uploads.
At Shade, we believe that creatives are spending more time managing files than actually being creative, and our mission is to win back creative’s time. We think all creative work can be done through one single source of truth from ingestion to rough cut to delivery to archive and all the workflows in between. Our latest round of funding of $14M announced today, will help us make that happen.
Today, we’re excited to announce our $14M funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital, bringing our total funding to $20M. As part of the round, we’re incredibly excited for Keith Rabois to be a part of our board and shape the direction and future of our company. We’re also grateful to our existing set of investors – General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary – for believing in us early. Our goal from the outset has been to bring together a set of investors who are forward-thinking, rigorous, and have a history of operating and investing in durable companies. More importantly, to bring an investor set that knows the pain points of the customers. We believe we’ve continued to achieve that excellence with our latest round.
Every team runs on its system of record. Sales lives in HubSpot and Salesforce, operations in Airtable, product in Linear and ClickUp. File systems should be no different – and arguably matter more. As companies pour investment into creative, content, and AI across every department, the absence of a single source of truth for storing, accessing, indexing, archiving, and processing files becomes a mess waiting to collapse. Everyone’s building the AI brain, but nobody’s building the memory. Shade is that system of record for files. And with our funding, we can continue to invest into our streamable file system, our AI search, our review platform, and our Shade 3.0 vision with the launch of automations and custom objects.
The Future
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 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 results speak for themselves. We’ve ingested over 60 million assets in the last 9 months while working with some of the largest brands, agencies, and sports companies in the world.
But we’re not stopping there. With the new funding, we are pouring investment into 4 core areas:
Building the best user experience possible
We recognize the importance of building a file system that people love to use on a regular basis. If this is the tool that all data flows through, it is the place that people must love to work in, share from, and leverage on a daily basis. This is why we’re pouring more resources into a unified design system, better user interactions, and a beautiful user experience.
Building the smartest search engine for any modality
We’ve always prided ourselves on being an incredibly forward thinking search company. But we aren’t going to stop at launching semantic search with custom metadata. With the new funding, we are doubling down on building search that works across all modalities, images, videos, and text, and diving deeper into direct moment detection and time-specific metadata. We’re diving deeper into how AI can help manage, sort, organize and save time labeling and updating metadata
The file system that represents your business
Today file systems largely focus on just storing files, or just doing review, or just being a MAM. We want to represent your business, whether that’s events, sports teams, clients, projects, or anything, having the flexibility to connect these “objects” to the way you store your files and to create no-code workflows that enable you to automate the busy work is something we’re investing into. We’re not just building a system of record; we’re building a system of action.
The most extensible file system
For workflows to be truly integrated and connected, we need Shade to be the most extensible platform there can be. We’re doubling down on developer experience, and, no ETA yet, but our Shade App Store
As we enter this next chapter, we’d love your ideas and feedback – that’s what drives us at Shade. Reach out anytime, join one of our meetups and events around the world, or swing by NAB Vegas for a sneak peek at some of these new features.
We’re excited for you to be a part of this journey with us and we’re just getting started.
Comments
This funding announcement is a significant milestone for Shade and its team. It may seem modest against the backdrop of the headline-grabbing AI investment rounds dominating the news cycle, but it deserves attention in its own right.
We had been following the company for some time, and finally got the chance to meet them in person at the 65th edition of The IT Press Tour in New York in October 2025. That meeting confirmed what we had suspected from the outside: the team has built a genuinely compelling cloud file storage solution tailored to the media and entertainment industry. More than just storage, it meaningfully enhances the user experience and team collaboration by accelerating productivity and production cycles through well-designed workflows and core features. Even in an M&E space where established products hold strong mindshare, there is clearly room for fresh approaches, and Shade is part of that wave, alongside Suite Studio, Strada, LucidLink, and others.
That said, we take issue with the suggestion that file systems have failed to evolve over the past five to ten years. Quite the contrary. In the similar domain, a solid group of vendors has been building cloud file storage solutions, referred to in earlier years as cloud gateways, that connect to centralized public or private S3 or object storage and layer on intelligence: data propagation, change synchronization, local integration, NAS protocol support and more recently adding AI-oriented features with advanced tagging being one of them. That list includes CTera, Egnyte, Hammerspace, Morro Data, Nasuni, NetApp, Panzura, Peer Software, Resilio (recently acquired by Nasuni), and Tiger Technology. Avere followed a similar path before being absorbed by Microsoft and pivoting its model. And other file system areas also have seen some progress.
The key questions worth exploring here are:
- What back-end storage does Shade leverage, S3, and if so, public or private?
- Is the approach standards-based or proprietary?
- How intrusive is it, can users rely on native access methods, or does it require an agent or custom driver?
- What are the primary use cases?
- Is it a horizontal solution or strictly vertical, built for M&E?
- And what are the specific differentiating features?
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