San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup Space has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to develop its AI-native distributed filesystem.
The round was led by a16z Speedrun, with participation from Golden Ventures, Northside Ventures and a group of angel investors.
Founded by Matthew Ao, Arihant Bapna and Jason Zhao, Space is building a distributed filesystem designed to combine cloud and local storage into a shared data layer.
The platform allows applications, human team members and AI agents to access cloud-hosted files as if they were stored locally. Instead of downloading entire files, Space streams only the required data in real time.
Funding to Expand Platform
Space plans to use the new funding to expand its operations and continue developing its platform for teams working in video, marketing, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) and AI-native industries.
The company is currently in private beta, with around 100 users and teams onboarded.
Building a New Way to Access Data
Space believes that as companies work with increasingly large video files, datasets, codebases and AI-generated content, moving and copying data can become a major bottleneck.
Its platform operates directly above the operating system, allowing cloud files to work with existing applications without requiring separate integrations for every tool.
Users can access files through familiar workflows, while AI agents can navigate shared data and retrieve only the information needed for a particular task.
Space says this approach could help reduce unnecessary file transfers and duplicated data while making large cloud-based datasets more accessible to both people and AI systems.
About Space
Space is building an AI-native filesystem for human creators and AI agents. Its distributed filesystem makes cloud-hosted data behave like local files inside existing applications, allowing computers, teammates, applications and AI agents to work from the same live data without full-file downloads or duplicated copies.
The company was founded by Matthew Ao, Arihant Bapna and Jason Zhao and is operated by Space Computer, Inc.
