For years, the Camera Roll on our smartphones has served a dual purpose: a repository for cherished memories and an ever-expanding archive for digital findings. From intriguing recipes and fashion inspiration to travel aspirations, memorable quotes, humorous social media posts, and product recommendations, our photo galleries often become a crowded collection of online discoveries. Today marks the launch of Pool, an innovative new application designed to finally bring order to this pervasive digital clutter.
Initiating your experience with Pool is straightforward: grant the app access to your photos, which are then intelligently categorized into what it terms “pools.” These personalized categories are dynamically generated based on the specific products, locations, or items you’ve saved over time, ensuring a highly relevant and user-centric organization system.
Pool joins a growing wave of startups, including mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop, that are reimagining the concept of bookmarking for the AI era. While these platforms assist users in organizing various saved content like links and images, Pool distinguishes itself by focusing exclusively on screenshots. Leveraging artificial intelligence, it empowers users to efficiently rediscover and act upon content they had previously intended to revisit.
Upon import, Pool demonstrates a remarkable capability to trace the original source link associated with any given screenshot. For instance, a screenshot of a product you considered purchasing would link directly to the retailer’s website. Similarly, a recipe captured from Instagram could instantly provide access to the creator’s shared ingredients and instructions, among other practical applications.
The genesis of this concept, as explained by Pool co-founder Maxime Junique, emerged from a shared frustration he experienced with his co-founder, Piet Terheyden. Both frequently found themselves screenshotting valuable information only to struggle with locating it again later.
“It sounds pretty obvious, right now, when we say it, but it’s something that we do so naturally — you don’t notice it, necessarily,” Junique remarked. The founders, who initially connected years ago in a co-working environment, validated this common issue by surveying their friends. Their peers readily concurred, admitting they too often captured visual ideas or inspiration through screenshots, only for these to be subsequently forgotten within their digital archives.
Remarkably, Pool was the inaugural product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, the founders’ product and design firm, approximately three years ago. The initial version was rapidly developed over a few weeks in Lisbon, during which the founders famously lived out of a van, building the landing page, website, and core functionality. However, they soon recognized the immediate need to develop revenue-generating products, leading them to pivot towards B2B SaaS solutions and temporarily shelve Pool.
Spinoff Studio subsequently achieved success with other ventures, notably developing the CRM software Waitless, which was acquired last year.
The resurgence of Pool was catalyzed by the significant advancements in artificial intelligence. Suddenly, the app’s foundational premise—making sense of personal, largely unstructured datasets—became technologically feasible and highly promising.
“We were like, it seems like a perfect time to go after this idea,” Junique shared with TechCrunch. He added, “And it also seemed to us like it’s a super untapped, unexplored data set for AI. Everyone goes after emails, bank transactions, chat logs — all of those productivity-first datasets. Who is going after this really, deeply emotional data set we all own?”
Pool’s application also innovatively treats your screenshots akin to memories, implying that some content holds immediate relevance while other items may gradually fade or disappear over time as their utility diminishes.
For instance, a screenshot of an event ticket barcode might automatically be removed from your active pools once the event has concluded. Conversely, if you capture an event flyer from Instagram, Pool’s integrated AI agents can proactively assist you in locating where to purchase tickets and provide direct links to ticketing platforms.
Users can efficiently retrieve content within Pool through its robust search functionality or by engaging with its integrated AI assistant for guidance.
Looking ahead, the founders intend to expand this core concept into a second, distinct application designed to function as a personal assistant. Pool’s distinctive mascot—the small rubber duck that users interact with to enter the app at launch—is slated to become a central part of the branding for this forthcoming agentic AI application.
During our conversation, the founders were situated in Lisbon—comfortably no longer in a van!—but were preparing to travel to San Francisco in late May for meetings with investors. The startup previously secured a pre-seed funding round totaling just over $2 million, with investments from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, Paris-based Source Ventures, and several angel investors, including Winston Du, Julian Blessin, and Thomas Ricouard.
Pool is currently available for free download on iOS devices.
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