Poly Relaunches with $8M Seed Round to Build AI-Powered Personal Cloud Storage

Poly emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding to build an intelligent file browser designed to replace native desktop tools like Finder and File Explorer. The seed round was led by Felicis, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, NextView Ventures, StartX, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, Wing Ventures, and MVP Ventures, as reported by TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance.

The San Francisco-based startup was originally founded in 2022 out of Y Combinator's S22 batch by Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young to build 3D asset generation tools. Following product interviews with users, Abhay Agarwal pivoted the company in 2023 to address personal file organization, while Sam Young departed the company. Poly spent two years in stealth building a cloud file browser with built-in multimodal search, automatic indexing, natural language querying, and content generation.

In-House Multimodal AI Architecture

Poly operates a fully home-grown AI platform rather than relying on third-party APIs. The company trains its own models for search and ranking, running a custom inference stack and data pipeline. Its proprietary embedding model, Polyembed-v1, parses text, PDFs, office documents, spreadsheets, images, audio, video, code, and web URLs to provide context-aware answers with citations, page numbers, and video timecodes.

To build out its core AI modeling and training pipelines, Poly is hiring for two AI-focused engineering roles in San Francisco, CA:

• The AI Research Engineer ($150,000 - $350,000 / year) involves applying core statistical modeling principles and utilizing PyTorch and CUDA for modeling and inference.
• The Platform Engineer — AI Infra Specialist ($150,000 - $300,000 / year) involves building data pipelines and working with PyTorch, CUDA, and modern LLM development fundamentals.

Platform and Desktop Infrastructure Hiring

Poly's application is available on web and macOS, with a Windows client in development. It offers 100GB of cloud storage on a free tier and 2TB for $10 a month, positioning itself against cloud storage providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive. The system features a local-first application architecture, synchronized cloud storage, and an integrated Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for integration with tools like ChatGPT and Cursor.

To expand its desktop capabilities and global infrastructure, Poly is hiring four additional platform engineers onsite in San Francisco, CA:

• The Platform Engineer — Desktop / OS Specialist ($150,000 - $300,000 / year) requires core software design for cross-platform native applications, utilizing OS APIs/FFI bindings and desktop web frameworks like Tauri or Electron.
• The Platform Engineer — Web Frontend Specialist ($150,000 - $300,000 / year) involves full-stack application development focusing on reactivity, persistence, and data caching using web technologies.
• The Platform Engineer — Infra / Reliability Specialist ($150,000 - $300,000 / year) requires passion for cloud service design and maintenance using tools like Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS services.
• The Platform Engineer — Generalist ($150,000 - $300,000 / year) involves designing fast and efficient database schemas and building local-first systems with fault tolerance.

Team and Leadership

Abhay Agarwal leads Poly as founder and CEO. He previously worked as a research fellow at Microsoft Research and as a lecturer at Stanford University, holding a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley and an M.S. from Stanford. Former co-founder Sam Young served as COO until late 2023 and has since joined BuildOps as Director of Growth. Poly's team also includes Head of Design Samuel Lo and Head of Engineering Alexandre Seo.

Open Roles at Poly

All open roles at Poly are full-time, onsite positions in San Francisco, CA.

See all open roles at Poly