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

20•aabhay•1h ago
Hello world, this is Abhay from Poly (https://poly.app). We’re building an app to replace Finder/File Explorer with something more intelligent and searchable. Think of it like Dropbox + NotebookLM + Perplexity for terabytes of your files. Here’s a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqCySU4Ln0.

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!

Comments

akersten•1h ago
Hooking up the Internet to my filesystem is scary. What security measures are in place to ensure a compromise of your infrastructure doesn't compromise mine?
bigyabai•1h ago
+1 for this - I don't trust proprietary software with access to my whole filesystem like this. Definitely not if a future update could change the pricing terms, introduce hidden telemetry or deprive me of the app on a whim.

This app gives me the same heebie-jeebies as the "Warp" terminal that was heavily pushed (and then rebuked) on HN. I don't want to replace my file browser or terminal with a subscription service, full-stop. The most magical featureset on the market won't move my needle, but then again maybe I'm not the ideal customer for this kind of product.

aabhay•23m ago
I'm not certain what exact scenario you are referring to. Do you mean if someone is able to install malware on our backend system will that malware get sent to you?

Is there something in particular that we are vulnerable to that doesn't also affect Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive, etc.?

prasoonds•1h ago
This is really cool! I suck at organizing my filesystem and I've lost track of how many times I had to find _that ONE_ PDF which I KNOW I have but cannot find! This would have solved that many times over.

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!

aabhay•27m ago
Agree. One thing that we see our users doing more of is "NotebookLM style tasks" where they just drop in a bunch of files or ask the agent to download stuff and then start using the agent to do things. Summarize, create notes, answer questions, etc. We believe that an increasing amount of work with "files" will be stuff like this, and having a file system that can search all your files to do these things seemed useful enough for us to build!
bangaladore•1h ago
Nitpick: Cursor for Files makes approximately zero sense to me given what I see here.

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.

aabhay•30m ago
I think the phrase is apt, actually, but it's not perfect:

1. We have an embedded agent that can read, edit, organize, and take actions on your files. This means it can read almost any media type, which is why it's "cursor for files" even though "isn't _cursor_, cursor for files?". In other words, Cursor is "Poly for text" :)

2. We provide you with an "IDE", I.e. a file browser. However, unlike Cursor we actually built our engine rather than relying on an existing open source one like VS Code

Lastly, agree about the enterprise solution. All in due time for sure!

Fraaaank•1h ago
I'd rather see a demo instead of a highly edited video with split second shots of the product.
dang•56m ago
Isn't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqCySU4Ln0 (linked above) that?

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!"

aabhay•25m ago
The video I provided was a raw, uncut, video. The editing is done by Screen Studio, which only does the "zoom" effect. But there's no studio magic there. I didn't speed anything up or cut out buggy bits or even do a retake!
saadatq•50m ago
When I read “Cursor for Files” my mind went to “app for reading and diffing content (i.e markdown) which I was very excited about.
aabhay•26m ago
Haha, we might need to actually build this feature!
theoldgreybeard•31m ago
While it seems like a cool enough product conceptually, in practice there is absolutely zero chance I'm putting my files in your cloud to be garbelled up by AI and paying you for the privilege. Also, allowing an agent to download arbitrary files from the internet is extremely alarming. nope nope nope nope NOPE

Only way I would ever use something like this is with a local/self-host model that I run myself on my own hardware, with meticulous control over what the thing can access on the internet.

aabhay•29m ago
Great user name for sure!
rahimnathwani•16m ago
Can you say more about how Polyembed-v1 handles video files? Does it handle the audio or just the video? What do you do about videos longer than a couple of minutes?
aabhay•14m ago
It handles both video frames and audio-in-video. So if you wanted, you could search for something that was said in a video and it'll find you the exact segment of it!

We don't use transcription or any post processing. We simply embed the file. Our embedding has an additional inner dimension to support long duration content. So it's [N x D] where D is the embed dimension and N is an internal dimension that varies on the content.

cyrusradfar•4m ago
Cool idea.

Maybe I'm too old, but after I read the post I thought -- oh this is an "AI-first Quicksilver" -- who remembers that plugin for Mac? I don't think they stayed relevant enough

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