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!

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.

Thanks for sharing this.

I am curious to know if your agent can connect to a user’s custom MCP server in order to make tool/calls with files attached. For example I have a custom MCP server that catalogs the images which are submitted in the RPS 2.0 payload. I have a python wrapper script that convert’s Cursor’s stdio MCP interface to an http request, inserting htaccess credentials and scanning the tool call args for any files that it needs to attach to the payload. This lets me set up the wrapper script as an MCP server in the cursor settings. This lets the built in Auto-mode agents do some similar kinds of tasks like you are describing.

With that said, it sounds like your system has better agents and tools for working with things besides just text files, so I am wondering if perhaps your agentic tools might be a good fit for a situation where for example I have a messy filesystem full of images that may already be duplicates in the database. If I provide the MCP tools into my database, can your system and agents use tools that I define? Does your system have ability to attach access credentials if/when making calls to third party mcp/tools?

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!

Very interested in the idea of an AI being able to interact with my filesystem.

we experimented with something like this: https://local-note-taker.vercel.app/chat

repo in case you'd rather run it locally: https://github.com/tambo-ai/local-note-taker

Curious to compare how our two ideas are built differently, feel free to reach out (email in my profile)

My immediate hesitance with a tool like this (which sounds awesome) is that I don't actually trust tools like Claude Code unless I have them running in a git directory where I can see exactly what changed, and easily revert when needed.

Do y'all have a solution for this here? Some kind of safety layer of some kind to easily review and optionally revert actions the agent has taken across my entire file system?

The search part of this is cool, but if the write side is solved, shut up and take my money.

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?

Won’t this only work when connected to the internet? So I can’t use it on a flight.

Or if I work in finance, or healthcare, or law, or government, or a hardware design company, I don’t want my files leaving my network. Those are very important use cases, much more important than searching my personal laptop. I want this for WORK, not my little photo collection or notes or whatever.

This is a great use case for modern LLM/embedding models but gotta be local to be actually useful in the places where it’s most needed.

The landing makes focus on multimedia, but I am writing a non fiction book, and most of my sources are links, PDFs, docs with notes, etc. Would it work in that case as well? My ideal solution should be able to oganize my files and be able to ask questions about the contents.

Great idea, but the landing page visuals is too cluttered, makes me want to have cursor for your website

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.

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

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?

Greplin was just too early.

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.

I'd rather see a demo instead of a highly edited video with split second shots of the product.