Space has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to build a distributed filesystem that gives humans and AI agents immediate access to cloud-hosted data without downloading or duplicating entire files locally. The round was led by a16z Speedrun, with participation from Golden Ventures, Northside Ventures and approximately a dozen angel investors with backgrounds across companies including Parsec, Sentry, Stan, Superwhisper and Modem.
Space is developing an AI-native filesystem that effectively merges cloud storage with the local filesystem.
Files stored remotely appear within tools such as Finder and can be opened by native applications as though they were stored on the computer itself.
Instead of downloading an entire file, Space streams only the specific byte ranges requested by an application or AI agent.
The architecture is intended for increasingly large datasets, design files, video libraries, codebases and machine-generated outputs that can exceed the storage capacity of individual computers.
Space believes the rise of AI agents makes data access a larger problem because agents frequently require files to be copied, uploaded, indexed or ingested into separate systems before they can use them.
By operating at the filesystem layer, Space is designed to let applications and agents work against the same live data without requiring an individual integration for every program.
Potential applications include video editing, architecture, software development and AI workflows.
A video editor, for example, could access a project larger than the local machine’s available storage, while an AI agent could search across an organization’s filesystem and retrieve only the portions of files needed for a particular task.
Space is currently in private beta with approximately 100 users and teams onboarded.
The company has also built an organic audience of more than 80,000 people across platforms.
Space was founded by Matthew Ao, Arihant Bapna and Jason Zhao, who experienced the storage problem while operating their previous company and moving terabytes of video footage each month.
The founders built the initial Space prototype in November 2025.
The company’s initial focus is on teams in video, marketing, architecture, engineering and construction before expanding into AI-native companies, media, AI training infrastructure, computer vision, enterprise data and world-model pipelines.
Longer term, the founders envision what they call the “Space Computer,” where a physical machine becomes a window into effectively unlimited cloud storage and compute.
KEY QUOTES:
“Humans and agents are working across more data than any local disk can hold. They should not have to wait for files to be copied or ingested before work can begin.”
Jason Zhao, Co-Founder Of Space
“The filesystem is the layer shared by every application, device, user, and agent. Rebuilding it around live, distributed data makes every workflow above it faster.”
Arihant Bapna, Co-Founder Of Space
“The computer no longer needs to hold every file. It becomes a window into any file, wherever it lives and however large it is.”
Matthew Ao, Co-Founder Of Space
“Space is disrupting one of the oldest assumptions in computing: a file has to exist on your device before you work with it. Matt, Ari, and Jason are innovating with a new type of AI-native filesystem that can serve both human creators and AI agents with the same primitive: instant access to the exact data they need.”
Jonathan Lai, General Partner At a16z
