Shade at NAB 2026: An AI-Powered System From Ingest to Delivery

by Johnnie BehiriApril 28^th, 2026

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At NAB 2026, we stopped by the Shade booth to talk with Brandon Fan, CEO and co-founder of the New York-based startup, about a platform that aims to replace the patchwork of cloud storage, review tools, and digital asset managers most filmmakers juggle today. Shade combines streamable cloud storage, AI-powered search, automated metadata tagging, and review workflows into what the company calls a “system of record for creatives.”

Shade arrives at this NAB with momentum. The company announced a $14 million funding round on April 22, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Construct Capital and Bling Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $20 million. Existing backers include General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary. According to Shade, the platform has ingested more than 60 million assets over the past nine months while serving customers that include Salesforce, Webflow, HelloFresh, Harry’s, and Lennar. The Las Vegas show floor was the first public stage for what the company is calling its Shade 3.0 vision.

A single source of truth from ingest to delivery

The pitch from Brandon was straightforward: most editorial teams stitch together six or seven tools to move a file from camera to client, and the result is fragmentation. Shade’s answer is to fold ingestion, search, review, NLE access, delivery, and archive into one platform. “We’ve looked at the tools in this world and said, look, is there an opportunity to actually build the [platform] where you ingest directly from your SD card to the place where you share files and deliver to your client, to the place where you’re searching, to even the place where you’re archiving,” Brandon told us at the booth.

In practice, that means files live in Shade’s cloud storage and surface inside a familiar files-and-folders interface, with a spreadsheet-style “views” mode that exposes both manual metadata (approval status, file type, resolution) and automated AI attributes (scene descriptions, identified objects, transcripts). Brandon’s example use cases ranged from a food agency tagging menu items to a sports team identifying jersey numbers automatically.

AI search that points to the exact moment in a clip

The most demonstrable feature on the booth was Shade’s natural-language search. Rather than retrieving an entire file, the system finds the precise sub-clip inside a video that matches the query. Brandon’s demo searched for “a person skiing while holding a laptop” inside Shade’s creative drive, and the platform jumped directly to the timestamped moment within a longer video where that scene appears. Users can leave timestamped comments on the result, similar to a Frame.io-style review, or send the clip straight into an editing timeline.

Under the hood, Shade says it has built its facial recognition model and its sub-clip search engine in-house, drawing on transcripts, visual analysis, and user-added metadata. According to Brandon, the system can also be tuned with custom prompts for industry-specific needs. He pointed to construction companies that have trained the platform to identify specific paver types and crane models, and to a sports league that built a prompt able to distinguish teams by colors, uniforms, and individual players. New custom-object capabilities, part of the Shade 3.0 rollout, extend this further to product recognition for things like shampoo bottles, gummy packaging, or vehicle fleets.

NLE integration and the streamable mount

For editors, the more relevant question is how Shade plugs into the cutting room. Today, Shade ships a dedicated panel for Adobe Premiere Pro that lets users drop searched sub-clips directly onto the timeline with the correct in and out points, while the file streams from the cloud through Shade’s mount. According to Brandon, dedicated panels for DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer are slated but not yet available; for now, those NLEs connect through the Shade mount, which exposes cloud storage as a local drive on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

That mount is the second piece of the puzzle. Built on FUSE technology, Shade’s “streamable” file system lets editors open and start cutting a multi-gigabyte file without waiting for a full download. Files can also be pinned for offline access on flaky connections. For a video team uploading proxies (or even camera originals) from a hotel room, that is a meaningful workflow change compared to syncing through a traditional cloud drive.

Shade also supports a bring-your-own-S3 model, integrating with Wasabi, Backblaze, AWS S3, and Cloudflare R2 for teams that want to keep storage costs and locations under their own control.

Automations and the Shade 3.0 vision

Brandon described automations that handle multi-step review chains, route assets to specific reviewers in sequence, or auto-generate edit-ready proxies the moment a file lands in storage, so editors traveling without their main rigs can still cut. The company has framed automations and custom objects as the two headline features of the Shade 3.0 roadmap announced alongside the funding round.

According to Brandon, Shade is positioned as a replacement for the combined functionality of Frame.io, LucidLink, and Iconik, with a single billing relationship and a single permission model. Shade has also completed SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA certifications, which matter for the enterprise and broadcast customers the company is courting.

Pricing, availability, and team

Shade is available now. According to Shade’s pricing page, the Growth plan starts at $20 per seat per month when billed annually (or $25 per seat monthly), and includes 500GB of active storage per seat, unlimited drives, and unlimited AI indexing. Workspaces on this tier are capped at 15 paid seats and up to 150 guests. The Enterprise tier moves to 1TB of active storage per seat and adds SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning, audit logging, a dedicated account manager, workflow consulting, and free data migration from existing tools. Brandon emphasized the migration service in particular, saying Shade’s team often helps customers move data and configure automations directly rather than leaving them to figure things out alone.

Have you been frustrated by the patchwork of tools in your post-production workflow? Would an AI-driven file system like Shade actually replace your current setup? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!