Space lands a16z speedrun backing for its vision to turn the cloud into your hard drive

By August 18, 2026
Four members of the Space team ist together on a couch.
Startup raises $2.4 million USD to build a more seamless version of Dropbox and Google Drive.

Toronto- and San Francisco-based startup Space has raised $2.4 million USD ($3.3 million CAD) for its cloud storage system that allows files to live on your device without taking up space. 

The news: The startup announced the pre-seed round led by San Francisco accelerator a16z speedrun on Tuesday morning. Other investors included Canadian venture capital firms Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures, as well as a dozen angel investors hailing from companies such as Parsec, Superwhisper, and Modem.

Founded by Jason Zhao, Arihant Bapna, and Matthew Ao, Space allows documents to live within a computer’s operating system, while the actual data itself is stored in the cloud. This means users can access files in their “space” as if it were their computer’s documents folder, even drag and modify the file in programs like Premiere, all without having to physically download the file onto their device. The startup posits that this is the next generation of storage, particularly in the AI era. 

From the source: “Space is disrupting one of the oldest assumptions in computing: a file has to exist on your device before you work with it,” a16z general partner Jonathan Lai said in a statement. “Matt, Ari, and Jason are innovating with a new type of AI-native file system that can serve both human creators and AI agents with the same primitive: instant access to the exact data they need.”

The context: Space was inspired by Zhao accumulating dozens of terabytes of footage across multiple physical drives while vlogging for his YouTube channel. The company is looking to relieve that problem for its initial customer base in the video, marketing, and architecture, engineering, and construction industries.

Final thought:  At the moment, Space is in private beta, with roughly 100 users and teams onboarded. The startup said it plans to eventually expand into more data-intensive areas like media, AI training infrastructure, computer vision, and enterprise data systems. Its long-term vision is the “Space Computer,” or the infinite computer, in which your physical device is just a window into the “effectively unlimited” storage and compute power of the cloud.

Feature image courtesy Space.

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