S

Shade

AI-powered platform for organizing creative assets

Graphic Designer

Full-Time
$95k - $135k/yr+ Equity
Mid
New York, NY, USA
HybridIn-person work at the Noho office is required.
Art, Graphics & AnimationGraphic Design

About the job

Requirements
  • Have 2-3 years of graphic design experience, preferably at a scaling startup at Series A or beyond.
  • Maintain a consistent brand image and work across surfaces including booth designs, digital assets, coffee cups, merchandise, and motion graphics.
  • Use Adobe Suite, After Effects, Jitter, Flutter, and Rive for static designs and motion graphics such as animations and lower-thirds.
  • Create product mockups in Photoshop.
  • Use Framer and Figma, including variables, auto-layout, responsive design, prototyping, and component library management.
  • Work with Framer CMS and optimize images and SVGs.
  • Take ownership as the first and last reviewer of a feature buildout.
  • Collaborate with engineers, understand the technology stack, and handle design-developer handoff while considering implementation cost.
  • Provide real, shipped graphics or items with live links, ideally spanning web, desktop, and mobile, and show end-to-end user experience.
  • Share a screenshot or prototype showing Figma work organization, such as flow structure, theme organization, or token naming.
Responsibilities
  • Work closely with the founding designer and CEO as the company's third design hire.
  • Design across brand surfaces, including booth designs, digital assets, coffee cups, merchandise, and motion graphics.
  • Create static designs, motion graphics, animations, lower-thirds, and product mockups.
  • Serve as the first and last set of eyes on a feature buildout.
  • Collaborate with engineers on design implementation and handoff.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience at a scaling startup, Series A or beyond.
  • Experience across animation, data visualization, illustration, editorial, or packaging, or other work demonstrating design range.
  • Product experience and design-system work.
  • Experience working with engineers and handling engineering handoff.
  • Token management.
  • Interest in brand messaging and visual strategy, including conceptual design work.

About the company

S

Shade

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Website

Preparing summary for Shade based on provided information.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Early VC

Total Funding

$20M

Headquarters

New York City, New York

Founded

2022

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Shade raised $14M in April 2026 from Khosla, Construct, and Bling.
  • It ingested 60 million assets in nine months, proving rapid product pull.
  • Customers include Salesforce, Webflow, HelloFresh, Harry's, and Lennar, signaling cross-industry adoption.

What critics are saying

  • Adobe, Dropbox, and Frame.io can bundle similar search and review features by 2027.
  • Shade's 94-plus paying customers and $20M total funding leave enterprise sales fragile.
  • If indexing quality slips, editors abandon ShadeFS and revert to legacy storage workflows.

What makes Shade unique

  • ShadeFS streams 50GB-plus files into Premiere and DaVinci without downloads.
  • Natural-language search finds exact video moments, not just filenames or folders.
  • SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA certifications support studio compliance deals.

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Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • 401(k) Retirement Plan
  • 401(k) Company Match
  • Unlimited Paid Time Off
  • Gym Membership
  • Commuter Benefits
  • Meal Benefits
  • Remote Work Options
  • Company Equity

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

8%

1 year growth

4%

2 year growth

4%
Benzatine
Apr 27th, 2026
Shade lands $14M to let creative teams search their video libraries in plain English

Creative and marketing teams often find traditional cloud storage solutions inadequate for their needs. The challenge of efficiently locating specific media files is exacerbated by the rapid increase in content generation driven by AI. In response to this growing issue, Shade, a startup based in New York, is developing a cloud storage platform tailored for agencies, sports media, consumer brands, real estate firms, and podcasters. On Wednesday, Shade announced it has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital, bringing its total funding to $20 million since its inception. Founded in 2024 by friends Brandon Fan and Emerson Dove, the company emerged from their shared frustration with existing tools like Dropbox, which they found lacking for file searches. "We built it out of our frustration as creatives," said Fan, highlighting their struggle with outdated storage solutions. Shade aims to redefine how creative files are stored and accessed, allowing companies to streamline their workflows as they produce more content. Fan likens Shade's role to that of early Customer Relationship Management systems, which transformed how businesses organized contact information. One of Shade's standout features is its natural language search functionality, enhanced by an auto-tagging system. This allows users to not only locate videos but also pinpoint exact moments within those videos that match their search queries. For example, a search for "a person holding a laptop in snow" will return relevant clips along with timestamps. Additionally, Shade automatically transcribes videos, enabling searches based on meaning and facial recognition. Another innovative aspect of Shade is its "streamable" file system, which facilitates immediate access to files without waiting for a full download. This feature proves particularly beneficial when working with large files, as users can begin editing right away. Beyond storage, Shade enhances team collaboration by enabling feedback on specific video timestamps and allowing attachments in comments for clearer direction. For teams looking to manage access, Shade provides the flexibility to create multiple links for the same assets, each with different permission settings. The platform also supports the creation of branded file collections for client deliveries, complete with password protection and expiration dates. Shade's pricing model is competitive, offering a $20 per seat, per month plan that includes unlimited drives and AI indexing, along with 500GB of active storage per user. This plan accommodates small teams of up to 15 members, with the option for 150 guest collaborators. As the demand for efficient media management grows, Shade is not alone in its mission. Competing startups like Poly and Memories.ai are also innovating in AI-driven file storage and search capabilities. Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois emphasized that while AI has increased content creation, the management of such content remains complex. He noted that Shade's comprehensive approach, which integrates streaming, indexing, and collaboration, sets it apart from competitors that merely layer search functionalities onto existing storage frameworks. Looking ahead, Shade plans to enhance its search capabilities across various file types, including images and documents, and is developing a no-code platform that will enable creative teams to automate workflows without needing programming skills. Fan envisions this as laying the groundwork for diverse business applications, extending beyond creative teams to include sectors like research and investment.

TechCrunch
Apr 23rd, 2026
Shade raises $14M for AI-powered video search and cloud storage platform

Shade, a New York-based startup building cloud storage for creative teams, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital and Bling Capital. The company has now raised $20 million in total since its founding in 2024. Founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove, Shade enables teams to search media files using natural language queries. The platform automatically tags content and can identify specific moments within videos matching search terms, such as "a person holding a laptop in snow." The startup's streamable file system allows users to begin editing large files immediately without waiting for downloads. Shade serves agencies, sports media teams, consumer brands and podcasters, offering plans starting at $20 per seat monthly. The company plans to expand search capabilities across file types and develop no-code workflow automation tools.

CMSWire
Apr 23rd, 2026
Shade closes $14M round as ai-driven media asset management heats up.

Shade closes $14M round as ai-driven media asset management heats up. April 23, 2026 With 60 million assets ingested in 9 months and Khosla Ventures leading, Shade presses its case as the intelligent file system for enterprise creative teams. The gist. * Funding secured. Shade raised $14M led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital and Bling Capital. * Unified file platform. Capital will fund multimodal search, business-object modeling and extensibility. * Creative team impact. Platform has ingested 60M+ assets across brands, agencies and sports organizations. Shade on April 23 announced a $14 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital and Bling Capital, with participation from existing investors General Catalyst, SignalFire and Contrary. The round brought total funding to $20 million, according to company officials. The startup plans to use the capital to advance what it calls an intelligent file system for creative teams - a single platform for storing, searching reviewing and archiving media assets. Keith Rabois joined the board as part of the round. Shade, founded in 2022, offers an AI-driven media asset management and collaboration platform for creative and media teams. The platform combines cloud-based access, full-resolution streaming and automated metadata generation, targeting mid-market to enterprise post-production houses, agencies, broadcasters and consumer brands. Shade said it has ingested more than 60 million assets in the past nine months while working with large brands, agencies and sports organizations. The investment targets four areas: user experience, multimodal AI search, business-object modeling and platform extensibility. Table of contents. Inflection point for industry: more creativity, less file management. In a blog post published alongside the announcement, co-founders Brandon Fan, CEO, and Emerson Dove, CTO, framed the funding as an inflection point for an industry problem they believe has gone largely unsolved: creative teams spending more time managing files than doing creative work. "File systems have largely stayed the same in the last 5-10 years," they wrote, pointing to assets scattered across storage silos, digital asset management platforms, review tools and archive drives - systems that, in their view, don't communicate with each other. The co-founders drew a direct parallel to how other business functions have consolidated around a single system of record - sales around Salesforce, operations around Airtable, product teams around Linear. Their argument: creative teams lack an equivalent, and the gap is becoming more expensive as companies pour investment into content and AI across departments. "Everyone's building the AI brain," they wrote, "but nobody's building the memory." One platform, four bets: how Shade plans to deploy the capital. Shade's platform today combines cloud storage, full-resolution streaming, AI-powered search and native review tools - positioning the product as a replacement for what the company says can be six or seven legacy tools running in parallel. The platform allows users to stream files exceeding 50GB directly into nonlinear editing timelines without downloads, while AI automatically tags, transcribes and analyzes footage during ingest. The company says a user can locate a specific type of footage - a CEO soundbite about sustainability, for example - in seconds rather than scrubbing through hours of raw material. Fan and Dove outlined four investment priorities for the new capital. On user experience, they said the file system must be a tool people want to use daily - not one they endure - and pointed to a unified design system and improved interactions as near-term targets. On search, they said the company plans to extend beyond semantic search with custom metadata into multimodal capabilities spanning video, images and text, with deeper investment in moment detection and time-specific metadata. The third priority - what Shade calls business-object modeling - represents a more ambitious shift in how the company defines a file system. Rather than simply storing files, Shade says it wants its platform to reflect how a company actually operates: mapping assets to clients, events, sports teams or projects, and enabling no-code workflow automation around those relationships. "We're not just building a system of record," Fan and Dove wrote. "We're building a system of action." The fourth area is platform extensibility, including investment in developer experience and a Shade App Store, for which the company gave no timeline. Shade said it plans to preview features tied to its Shade 3.0 roadmap at NAB Las Vegas. Shade's feature & investment breakdown. Shade outlined current capabilities and investment priorities funded by the new round. | Capability | Description | | Streamable file system | Streams 50GB+ files to NLEs without downloads | | AI search | Auto-tags, transcribes and analyzes footage during ingest | | Review platform | Syncs timestamped comments to NLE timelines | | Multimodal search | Planned search across images, video and text | | Custom objects | Business-object modeling for events, clients and projects | Recent Shade news. Shade has been quietly building an enterprise-ready "Intelligent Cloud NAS," reaching a reported $300,000 in monthly revenue by April. The company completed SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA and related security certifications in May 2025, launched ShadeFS and an AI-powered neural search engine in January, and showcased the full platform at NAB Las Vegas 2026. Notable news & distinguished data for tomorrow's c-suite. Fan disclosed the revenue milestone on April 22, with a customer list that includes Webflow, Salesforce and HelloFresh. What an intelligent file system must deliver for creative teams. For creative and marketing operations leaders evaluating next-generation media infrastructure, the case for an intelligent file system rests on six interconnected capabilities rather than any single feature. AI-Powered metadata & search. Context is the foundation of any unified media workflow. AI needs to know not just what an asset is, but where it can be used, who it targets and how it performs, according to CMSWire analysis of intelligent content. Machine learning models can auto-tag images and video, generate alt text, transcribe audio, identify people and products, and summarize content based on existing assets, reducing manual tagging and accelerating retrieval. Native creative tool integration. Productivity gains evaporate if governed assets require context-switching. Connector tools embed brand-approved assets directly inside Adobe Creative Suite, PowerPoint, Google Docs and Canva, letting designers search, preview and place approved files without leaving their native environment, as recent CMSWire reporting describes. Governance, permissions & audit logging. Governance must be embedded at the content layer, not bolted on afterward. Role-based access, license tracking, version control and audit trails are what make AI-assisted content safe to publish at scale, according to CMSWire analysis of component content management. File transformation & transcoding. A master file must be instantly adaptable across channels - print, web, social, video thumbnail - without human intervention. A content intelligence framework identifies transcoding as the adaptability engine behind composable, multi-channel execution. Learning Opportunities Performance feedback loops. Connecting asset performance data - views, downloads, conversion rates - back to metadata creates a feedback loop that informs which assets work for a given audience. Teams pairing this with predictive analytics can anticipate which formats will resonate before committing production resources. Agentic orchestration. Agentic AI is reshaping enterprise creative workflows by enabling autonomous, end-to-end orchestration that adapts dynamically rather than following static automation rules. The shift is also accelerating interest in agentic marketing models that extend autonomous workflows into campaign execution. Have a tip to share with its editorial team? Drop Gingertec a line: [email protected] Dom Nicastro is editor-in-chief of CMSWire and an award-winning journalist with a passion for technology, customer experience and marketing. With more than 20 years of experience, he has written for various publications, like the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Magazine. He has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, informative, and engaging content to his readers. Dom works tirelessly to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry to provide readers with accurate, trustworthy information to help them make informed decisions. Connect with Dom Nicastro: Main image: Shade Featured Research