For years, your phone’s camera roll has served two purposes. Not only does it help you revisit special moments, but it also serves as an archive for all sorts of things you find online, including recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations, and more. Today, a new app called Pool is coming to help us finally make sense of this digital chaos.
To start using Pool, all you have to do is give it access to your photos, and they’ll be moved into a category called “Pool.” Pools created in the app are completely dependent on the products, locations, or things you have saved over time and are unique to you.
This app is one of many that have reinvented bookmarking in the AI era. While startups like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop help users organize links, images, and other saved content, Pool focuses specifically on screenshots, using AI to help users rediscover what they intended to revisit later and act on it.
Once imported, Pool will be able to track the original link associated with a particular screenshot. For example, if you take a screenshot of a product you’re considering purchasing, we’ll show you a link to the retailer’s website. If you see a recipe on Instagram, chances are you’ll see the ingredients and instructions shared by the creator. and so on.
Pool co-founder Maxime Junique explained that the idea was born because he and co-founder Piet Terheyden were facing the same problem. That meant I could screenshot something I wanted to remember and then never be able to find it again.
“Now when we say it, it sounds pretty obvious, but it’s something we do naturally. We don’t necessarily realize it,” Junik said. The founders, who met at a coworking space a few years ago, asked friends about the issue. Friends agreed that they often take screenshots and forget about them, such as design ideas or other types of inspiration.
The app was actually the first product to come out of the founder’s product and design studio, Spinoff Studio, about three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over several weeks, with the founders living in a van and perfecting the landing page, website, and initial build. But they quickly realized they needed to build some products that would generate revenue first, so they pivoted to B2B SaaS and shelved Pool.
The studio also continued to develop other products, including CRM software Waitless, which it acquired last year.
It was the maturation of AI that brought the pool back to life. Suddenly, its central idea of making sense of personal, largely unstructured datasets seemed possible.
“We felt it was the perfect time to bring this idea to fruition,” Junique told TechCrunch. “And it also seemed to us that it was a very untapped and untapped data set for AI. Everyone is going after all the productivity-first data sets, like emails, banking, chat logs. Who would go after this really very emotional data set that we all own?”
Pool’s app also treats screenshots like memories. That is, some are more relevant at the time, while others disappear over time.
For example, if you screenshot the barcode on an event ticket, the barcode may disappear after the event takes place. Meanwhile, if you screenshot a flyer about an upcoming event on Instagram, Pool’s AI agent will help you find where to buy tickets and a link to the ticketing site.
To find information in Pool, you can search or ask the built-in AI assistant for help.
Next, the founders plan to incorporate this concept into a second, separate app that will act as a personal assistant of sorts. The pool mascot, a little rubber duck that you press and drag across the screen at startup to enter the pool, will be part of the branding for this agent-based AI app they’re planning.
When we spoke, the founders were in Lisbon and already in a van. — but headed to San Francisco in late May to meet with investors. The startup previously raised a $2 million-plus pre-seed round from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, Paris-based Source Ventures, and other angels including Winston Du, Julian Blessin, and Thomas Ricouard.
Pool is currently available as a free download on iOS.
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