Poly has emerged from two years in stealth with an $8 million seed round to introduce a next-generation file browsing platform designed for an AI-driven workplace. Felicis led the round with participation from Bloomberg Beta, NextView, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, Wing Ventures, and MVP Ventures.
The funding will support product development, AI infrastructure, and early hiring as the company begins rolling out its desktop application and opening its waitlist to the public.
Based in San Francisco, Poly has built an AI-powered file browser that connects local storage to the cloud while adding an intelligent layer that can search, summarize, tag, and organize content across documents, images, video, audio, and more. The browser allows users to ask questions about their files and receive contextual, accurate answers drawn from across their entire file system. The Poly agent can also act on existing content by generating summaries, transcripts, tabulations, podcasts, presentations, and other outputs that draw on what users already have stored.
The company’s architecture centers on a proprietary multimodal embedding model called Polyembed v1, which can interpret formats ranging from text and PDFs to media files, code, spreadsheets, and URLs. The technology enables the platform to provide deeper insights, return citations with page numbers and timecodes, and support broad, complex search queries across multiple file types. Poly reports that the model outperforms comparable embedding systems in retrieval quality and multimodal search accuracy.
Early beta testers have used Poly to streamline research, organize creative materials, and surface insights hidden within extensive or disorganized archives. The tool has been adopted by support teams looking to navigate extensive internal documentation, researchers examining dense archives, and creators using reference folders to generate new ideas or visuals. Poly expects demand to grow as more people seek ways to work across formats within a single intelligent environment.
Poly’s application is now available for macOS, with a Windows version in development. The company will begin onboarding new users from its waitlist starting November 19.
KEY QUOTES
“Poly was built on the belief that in an AI first world, the file system itself has to evolve. We created a browser that replaces Finder or File Explorer with an intelligent interface that can help search, understand, and create across terabytes of information. It’s like having an LLM with infinite context from your life.”
Abhay Agarwal, Founder And CEO, Poly
“What Abhay’s team has created is a new ‘tool for thought’ that is native to AI. They’re not just technical virtuosos, they’re also distilling that complexity into something universal and human. We all desperately need the file browser to come back.”
James Cham, Partner, Bloomberg Beta
“Poly is redefining how people connect with their own information. Instead of burying knowledge in folders, Poly surfaces context and creativity, turning everyday files into a personal intelligence layer that helps people work and think faster.”
David Beisel, Partner, NextView Ventures
