SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Aug 18, 2026 – Space has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding led by a16z Speedrun to build an AI-native distributed filesystem that merges the cloud and the local drive into one shared data layer. Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures joined the round, along with angel investors with backgrounds in prosumer and enterprise software, including Parsec, Sentry, Stan, Superwhisper, and Modem.
How the Filesystem Works
The filesystem sits above the operating system (OS). Applications, teammates and AI agents access the same files as if they were stored locally, without full-file downloads, duplicated copies, or application-specific integrations. Files appear in Finder and open in existing applications without a download or permanent local copy. When an application or agent requests data, Space streams only the exact byte ranges required, in real time.
Space lists these use cases: a video editor opens a project larger than the computer in front of them without waiting; an architect works on a building model whose assets stream only as the application needs them; a developer works across a repository without storing it on a laptop; an agent traverses an organization’s context through the shared filesystem and reads only the portions of each file relevant to its task.
“Humans and agents are working across more data than any local disk can hold. They should not have to wait for files to be copied or ingested before work can begin,” said Jason Zhao, co-founder of Space.
“The filesystem is the layer shared by every application, device, user, and agent. Rebuilding it around live, distributed data makes every workflow above it faster,” said Arihant Bapna, co-founder of Space.
“The computer no longer needs to hold every file. It becomes a window into any file, wherever it lives and however large it is,” said Matthew Ao, co-founder of Space.
Company Background
Space was founded by Matthew Ao, Arihant Bapna and Jason Zhao. Zhao accumulated dozens of terabytes of footage across drives while documenting his life on YouTube over the past decade. The founders built the first prototype in Nov’2025 and worked out of Founders Inc. in San Francisco while raising the round.
Roadmap
Space is in private beta with about 100 users and teams onboarded, backed by an organic audience of more than 80,000 across platforms. The company is starting with teams in video, marketing, and AEC, then plans to expand into media and entertainment, AI training-data infrastructure, computer vision, enterprise data systems, and world-model pipelines.
“Space is disrupting one of the oldest assumptions in computing: a file has to exist on your device before you work with it,” said Jonathan Lai, general partner at a16z. “Matt, Ari, and Jason are innovating with a new type of AI-native filesystem that can serve both human creators and AI agents with the same primitive: instant access to the exact data they need.”
Source: Space
About Space
Space develops a cloud file system for Mac computers. Its software appears in Finder as a drive and streams file data from cloud storage when applications request it. Users can open, edit and save large files without downloading complete local copies. Space supports applications including DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop and Blender. The company also offers Spacebar, a keyboard-activated file search tool. Its target users include video production, design and 3D content teams. Space synchronizes saved changes among connected Macs through cloud storage. Users can access files while uploads are still in progress.
