Poly (US) has closed an $8,000,000 Seed round, marking a decisive moment for one of the most ambitious productivity startups in the modern era. Led by Felicis, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, NextView Ventures, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, Wing Ventures, and MVP Ventures, the round validates a problem millions of workers silently battle every day: digital chaos.

Founded by Abhay Agarwal, Poly aims to become nothing less than the intelligent file browser for the AI era. Instead of navigating cluttered folders, broken naming conventions, and countless cloud drives, Poly gives users an interface that feels intuitive, visual, and deeply searchable—powered by AI that understands how people actually work.

This isn’t simply about finding files faster. It’s about reshaping how creators, teams, and organizations capture knowledge and access it at the moment it matters.

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The Problem Poly Is Built to Solve

Knowledge workers today spend up to 1.8 hours per day searching for files or information—nearly 20% of the workday. This inefficiency compounds across teams, costing companies real money and slowing down decision-making.

The explosion of cloud tools has made the problem worse. The average startup now uses over 100 SaaS applications, creating fragmented storage across:

• Google Drive
  
• Notion
  
• Dropbox
  
• Figma
  
• Slack
  
• Internal knowledge bases
  
• And dozens more
  

Poly unifies these scattered sources and layers intelligence on top of them. Instead of manually remembering folders, version names, or when something was last edited, users can simply think, type, or visually browse—and Poly does the rest.

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What Poly Actually Does

Poly’s platform reimagines the file browser as a visual, AI-powered interface. Files appear as preview-rich cards organized by project, topic, collaborator, or semantic meaning rather than strict folder hierarchies.

Key capabilities include:

• AI semantic search that understands context, not keywords
  
• Unified browsing across drives, apps, and local storage
  
• Visual organization that shows your work like a gallery instead of a directory
  
• Real-time sync as files update across platforms
  
• Automatic grouping of related assets, references, and versions
  

The result is a workspace where finding the right file feels natural—not like detective work.

Designers can browse every version of a mockup visually.
Product managers can surface old documents just by remembering what they contained.
Teams can pick up work instantly, even if someone is out.

Poly isn't just a file tool; it’s a memory engine for organizations.

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And Here’s the Real Leverage Behind Poly

As Poly becomes the shared layer through which a team understands its files, a deeper shift happens—the platform starts shaping how that team works altogether. When people instinctively turn to Poly instead of native drives, the browser silently becomes the operating layer for knowledge.

This is the moment where productivity tools cross into something more powerful.
When a company’s historical context, creative process, and decision trails become discoverable instead of buried, a team’s speed isn't just slightly improved—it's fundamentally rewired.

Founders often assume defensibility comes from features or AI models. But long-term defensibility almost always comes from becoming the place where an organization’s memory lives. Once a team’s collective knowledge is indexed, connected, and accessible through a single interface, switching costs skyrocket—not because they’re trapped, but because the alternative would feel like going back to working blindfolded.

Poly is designing for this layer of inevitability: a workspace where teams don’t just store files—they build a navigable history of their work.

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Why Investors Are Betting Big on Poly

Felicis and Bloomberg Beta have backed many category-defining tools, and their investment signals confidence in Poly’s potential to reshape how people work.

The timing is perfect:

• AI-driven knowledge tools are growing at 20%+ annually
  
• Teams are producing more digital assets than ever
  
• The rise of remote and hybrid work increases the need for shared context
  
• Creative software usage is exploding, with design workflows up 40% year-over-year
  

Poly sits directly at the intersection of these trends. The more teams rely on visual collaboration tools like Figma, Notion, and Miro, the greater the need for a browser that understands creative workflows holistically.

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Industry Outlook: A Massive Opportunity

Globally, the digital file-management and enterprise search market is expected to surpass $9 billion by 2026, driven by AI integration and exponential content growth.

Meanwhile:

• The average knowledge worker manages over 10,000 files
  
• Creative teams generate 60% more assets per year
  
• Poor file organization contributes to $3,900 in productivity loss per employee annually
  

Poly doesn’t just relieve this burden—it converts chaos into structure, and structure into institutional clarity.

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What Comes Next for Poly

With fresh funding, Poly plans to:

• Expand integrations with more cloud tools and design platforms
  
• Improve its semantic understanding and file-relationship AI
  
• Launch team-wide collaboration workspaces
  
• Build enterprise-grade admin and security features
  
• Grow its engineering and product teams to support rapid scaling
  

The larger vision is clear:
To become the universal interface for how organizations visualize, retrieve, and understand their files—regardless of where those files are stored.

If the modern workplace is defined by digital abundance, Poly is building the system that makes that abundance usable.