Launch HN: Poly (YC S22) – Cursor for Files

Poly can search your content in natural language, across a broad range of file types and down to the page, paragraph, pixel, or point in time. We also provide an integrated agent that can take actions on your files such as creating, editing, summarizing, and researching. Any action that you can take, the agent can also take, from renaming, moving, tagging, annotating, and organizing files for you. The agent can also read URLs, youtube links, and can search the web and even download files for you.

Here are some public drives that you can poke around in (note: it doesn’t work in Safari yet—sorry! we’re working on it.)

Every issue of the Whole Earth Catalogue: https://poly.app/shared/whole-earth-catalogues

Archive of old Playstation Manuals: https://poly.app/shared/playstation-manuals-archive

Mini archive of Orson Welles interviews and commercial spots: https://poly.app/shared/orson-welles-archive

Archive of Salvador Dali’s paintings for Alice in Wonderland: https://poly.app/shared/salvador-dali-alice-in-wonderland

To try it out, navigate to one of these public folders and use the agent or search to find things. The demo video above can give you an idea of how the UI roughly works. Select files by clicking on them. Quick view by pressing space. Open the details for any file by pressing cmd + i. You can search from the top middle bar (or press cmd + K), and all searches will use semantic similarity and search within the files. Or use the agent from the bottom right tools menu (or press cmd + ?) and you can ask about the files, have the agent search for you, summarize things, etc.

We decided to build this after launching an early image-gen company back in March 2022, and realizing how painful it was for users to store, manage, and search their libraries, especially in a world of generative media. Despite our service having over 150,000 users at that point, we realized that our true calling was fixing the file browser to make it intelligent, so we shut our service down in 2023 and pivoted to this.

We think Poly will be a great fit for anyone that wants to do useful things with their files, such as summarizing research papers, finding the right media or asset, creating a shareable portfolio, searching for a particular form or document, and producing reports and overviews. Of course, it’s a great way to organize your genAI assets as well. Or just use it to organize notes, links, inspo, etc.

Under the hood, Poly is built on our advanced search model, Polyembed-v1 that natively supports multimodal search across text, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, audio, video, PDFs, and more. We allow you to search by phrase, file similarity, color, face, and several other kinds of features. The agent is particularly skilled at using the search, so you can type in something like “find me the last lease agreement I signed” and it can go look for it by searching, reading the first few files, searching again if nothing matches, etc. But the quality of our embed model means it almost always finds the file in the first search.

It works identically across web and desktop, except on desktop it syncs your cloud files to a folder (just like google drive). On the web we use clever caching to enable offline support and file conflict recovery. We’ve taken great pains to make our system faster than your existing file browser, even if you’re using it from a web browser.

File storage plans are currently at: 100GB free tier, paid tier is 2TB at $10/m, and 1c per GB per month on top of the 2TB. We also have rate limits for agent use that vary at different tiers.

We’re excited to expand with many features over the following months, including “virtual files” (store your google docs in Poly), sync from other hosting providers, mobile apps, an MCP ecosystem for the agent, access to web search and deep research modes, offline search, local file support (on desktop), third-party sources (WebDAV, NAS), and a whole lot more.

Our waitlist is now open and we’ll be letting folks in starting today! Sign up at https://poly.app.

We’d also love to hear your thoughts (and concerns) about what we’re building, as we’re early in this journey so your feedback can very much shape the future of our company!

However, at least for my use-case, this is a very infrequent problem. So, a monthly subscription and the security risk wouldn't be worth it. Though I'm certain there are people who work with files all day and for them, this might be god-send!

Feedback:

Supporting an enterprise air gapped solution of this clearly has huge value. It really doesn't matter where the data is stored if the indexing / embedding is happening on your infrastructure.

Enterprises with compliance requirements are quite likely the types of clients looking for ways to save time searching through petabytes of data.

Here's what we always tell founders about demo videos: "What works well for HN is raw and direct, with zero production values. Skip any introductions and jump straight into showing your product doing what it does best. Voiceover is good, but no logos or music!"