Every creative director has been there. You’re juggling Dropbox, LucidLink, Frame.io, Google Drive, and maybe Box – all while your CFO questions why you need so many tools, IT demands better permissions tracking, and your editors can’t find that one file from last year’s campaign. It’s messy, expensive, and honestly? It’s slowing everyone down.
During VMblog’s recent visit to the 64th edition of The IT Press Tour in New York, we sat down with Brandon Fan, Co-founder and CEO of Shade, Inc., a company that’s rethinking how creative teams handle their most valuable asset: their files. What we learned was refreshing – here’s a startup that actually gets the pain points, because they’ve lived them.
The Hair-on-Fire Problem Nobody’s Solving
Let’s start with some context. Brandon laid out the problem pretty clearly: “Today, Joseph (Creative Director) spends more time managing files than being creative.” That’s not hyperbole. According to Shade’s research, creative professionals are spending roughly 15 hours each week just stringing together five or more different tools to do their jobs.
The numbers tell an alarming story. Right now, 15 million terabytes are requested every minute across AI agents, agencies, editing teams, and remote collaborators. By 2027? That’s projected to hit 100 million terabytes per minute, driven by the explosion of generative AI and growing file sizes.
Brandon shared real customer quotes that paint a vivid picture of the frustration:
“I cannot run my video team on Box. It takes 10 hours to download the footage we need to produce a 2 minute promo,” said Daniel Rivera from Harry’s.
“Box shut down our account for 30 days because we tried to download a 1 TB project,” recalled Jillian Green from The James Agency.
“Google Drive literally revoked our unlimited storage, and now we’ve lost access to our entire account,” Dan LaPray from Unifyd explained.
These aren’t edge cases. This is the reality for creative teams working with modern file sizes and cloud platforms that weren’t built for their workflows.
Why Legacy Storage Platforms Are Breaking Down
Here’s the thing: in 2025, every company has essentially become a creative production company. Whether you’re a 10-person agency or a 500+ enterprise, you’re producing video, graphics, CAD files, and marketing assets at an unprecedented scale.
Brandon walked us through a typical creative director’s nightmare scenario. Joseph (their fictional but all-too-real persona) faces constant pressure from the CFO to consolidate tools and reduce costs, endless pestering from IT about permissions management, and the impossible task of knowing where every file lives across seven different software platforms.
The workflow inefficiency is staggering. Without Shade, downloading 5TB of footage from one platform and re-uploading to another could take 22+ hours. Manually archiving 20TB of RAW files? That’s nearly 89 hours. Sharing 500GB of audio files between LA and NYC the old way meant shipping hard drives and waiting 2-5 business days.
“I’m losing my mind, we need a better solution,” Brandon quoted from one creative director. That sentiment resonates.
What Shade Actually Does
Shade’s approach is straightforward: become the single source of truth for creative workflows. Instead of uploading files eight different times to eight different platforms, you upload once to Shade.
The platform combines several key capabilities that previously required separate tools:
- Streaming file access means you can work with 5GB+ projects without downloading everything first. Think of it like how LucidLink operates-you mount Shade as a local drive, but the files stream from the cloud as you need them.
- Built-in review and approval replaces Frame.io. You get time-stamped comments, annotation tools, markup capabilities, and shareable web links with customizable permissions-all without leaving the platform.
- AI-powered organization is where things get interesting. Shade uses computer vision and modern AI to auto-tag and describe assets. Brandon demonstrated this by showing how their system can analyze hundreds of thousands of assets and create searchable metadata automatically.
“Tagging 300 videos with 1-2 sentence descriptions used to take 200+ hours. With Shade’s AI autotagging agents, it takes about 1 minute,” Brandon explained.
The semantic search is genuinely impressive. During the demo, Brandon searched for “people running along the lake” and instantly found the exact asset needed from thousands of files. That kind of Google Photos-style search, but for professional creative assets? That’s a game-changer.
Version control and archive storage round out the feature set, meaning teams have a complete workflow from ingest to delivery in one platform.
The Economics Are Compelling
From a cost perspective, Shade’s value proposition is hard to ignore. The company showed real customer examples where organizations were spending anywhere from $8,000 to $500,000 annually on fragmented tool stacks-combinations of LucidLink, Frame.io, Iconik, hard drives, on-premise NAS systems, Google Drive, Dropbox, and various archive solutions.
After consolidating to Shade, those same customers reported 55-70% cost savings while gaining additional functionality. A consumer company managing 10TB that was spending $8,000 dropped to $3,600. A sports organization with 700TB went from $170,000 to $70,000-a 59% reduction.
Brandon noted, “Total cost savings for one customer scenario was $105,200 down to $39,360 for 10 seats and 100TB-that’s 62% savings.”
The pricing model is subscription-based, charging for both seats and storage. Brandon explained they typically recommend the Enterprise plan for teams above 15 seats, though they have a growth plan for smaller teams just getting started.
Technical Architecture That Makes It Work
What impressed us from a technical standpoint is how Shade built this from the ground up with modern infrastructure. The platform works across Mac, Windows, and Linux using FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) technology to mount cloud storage as local drives.
For AI capabilities, Shade uses a hybrid approach. They leverage OpenAI for custom metadata generation (where you can give prompts like “identify the shoot lighting: dawn, dusk, or night”), but built their own distilled semantic search engine in-house. This allows them to run searches on millions of assets quickly on CPU infrastructure rather than expensive GPU setups.
“We’ve taken these larger Open Source Vision models, distilled them to make it run super quickly on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of assets,” Brandon explained.
They also use Assembly AI for transcription and built custom facial recognition algorithms optimized for massive scale-something traditional clustering algorithms couldn’t handle efficiently.
From a storage perspective, Shade supports bring-your-own-S3 options, integrating with providers like Wasabi, Backblaze, AWS S3, and Cloudflare R2. There’s a management fee that covers the costs of proxies, previews, AI processing, transcripts, and the globally distributed infrastructure that enables fast streaming and access.
Real Customer Traction
Since launching publicly in early 2025, Shade has signed 94 paying customers, with the vast majority coming through inbound channels – referrals, Google search, and social media. The viral nature of a sharing product helps too; when someone shares a Shade link externally, recipients see what the platform can do.
“About 20% of our clientele that we’ve been able to acquire has just been people sharing links out,” Brandon noted.
The customer list spans impressive brands including Salesforce (which uses 500TB just for their Dreamforce operations), Harry’s, Lennar, and various creative agencies and production companies. Average contract value sits around $10,000-$15,000 annually, typically for a 10-user, 25TB setup.
Customer testimonials reveal genuine enthusiasm:
“Shade’s AI tagging saves us hours of manual logging. Our editors can finally focus on storytelling, not file wrangling,” said Chris Santiago, Multimedia Innovation Lead at TEAM.
“Switching to Shade from LucidLink was a no-brainer. I kept the same workflows and gained even more with AI search and built-in review,” Travis Oberlander, YouTube Production Manager at Grüns, explained.
The sales cycle is remarkably fast-typically about seven days for the decision, with most delays coming from procurement and legal processes rather than product evaluation. Brandon’s pitch is simple: “This is what you’re using today. If Shade is clearly doing what you’re doing today, but doing a lot more, then it should be fairly straightforward to switch.”
What’s Coming Next
Looking ahead, Shade is focused on becoming what Brandon calls “a CRM for your files” – a true system of record in an AI-first world. The roadmap for 2026 includes building out automations with a Shade API, creating an ecosystem of integrations, and launching Shade Vault for archival needs.
The automation vision is particularly interesting. Brandon walked through scenarios where creative workflows could trigger actions across the entire business – when a Clickup task moves to “New Projects,” Shade could automatically create folder structures based on a content brief. When an asset gets approved, it could auto-publish to Instagram Reels and update metadata with performance metrics.
“There’s a big opportunity to build the systems of record that actually enable businesses to leverage AI,” Brandon told us. “If you look at CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, document tools like Notion, project management like Asana – they all serve as systems of record. But file storage hasn’t changed in 10 years. It’s still Dropbox and Google Drive.”
The company’s growth targets are aggressive but seem achievable given their traction. With 15 team members today (planning to double within the year), they’re targeting $10 million in revenue by the end of next year – a significant jump from their current run rate of approximately $1.5 million annually.
Brandon’s confidence comes from proven unit economics: “On a per rep basis, we have the confidence that they’re capital efficiently producing the revenue they need. They’re paying back quite immediately, which gives us the upfront working capital.”
Why This Matters for IT Leaders
From an enterprise IT perspective, Shade addresses several pain points that should resonate with CTOs and infrastructure teams. The security posture includes SSO, SCIM directory sync provisioning, audit logs, and granular permissions management at both the workspace and individual asset level.
The platform supports link-based permissions with options for viewing, commenting, downloading, password protection, and link expiration-all the controls needed to protect intellectual property while enabling collaboration.
For organizations struggling with data sprawl across multiple creative tools, the consolidation opportunity is real. Instead of managing permissions, access, and billing across five or six platforms, IT teams get a single pane of glass.
The bring-your-own-storage option also provides flexibility for organizations with existing cloud infrastructure investments or specific data residency requirements.
The Bigger Picture
What makes Shade interesting isn’t just that they’re combining existing tool capabilities – it’s that they’re rethinking the fundamental workflow around creative files with modern technology. The post-COVID reality is that creative teams need to work remotely with collaborators distributed globally. Hard drives and on-premise NAS systems alone don’t cut it anymore.
The explosion of file sizes driven by 4K/8K video, generative AI content, and complex creative projects means the old approaches are breaking down. Organizations are hitting account limits, facing service shutdowns for “excessive” use, and spending more time on file logistics than actual creative work.
Brandon summed up the opportunity well: “20 years ago, when HubSpot or Salesforce launched, we were all on spreadsheets and documents, not knowing where anything was. Then they came along and said, look, we can actually organize the whole thing. That’s where the file system world is today.”
For creative directors tired of tool sprawl, CFOs looking to reduce software spend, and IT teams drowning in permissions management across multiple platforms, Shade offers a compelling alternative worth evaluating. The 94 customers they’ve signed in just over a year suggest the market is ready for this approach.
Whether Shade becomes the “system of record for files” they’re aiming for remains to be seen. But in an industry where established players like LucidLink (with $100M+ raised) and Frame.io (acquired by Adobe for $1.275 billion) have focused on specific pieces of the workflow, there’s clearly room for a unified platform that solves the whole problem.
And honestly? Anything that gives creative teams back 15 hours a week to actually be creative instead of managing file transfers seems like a win.
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