For years, your phone’s Camera Roll has served dual purposes. In addition to helping you revisit special moments, it has also served as an archive for all sorts of things you find online, like recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations, and more. Today, a new app called Pool is arriving to help you finally make sense of this digital clutter.
To get started with Pool, you simply give it permission to access your photos, which are moved into categories it calls “pools.” The pools created in the app are entirely dependent on the products, places, or things that you’ve saved over time, making them specific to you.
The app is one of many reinventing bookmarking in the AI era. Startups like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop help users organize links, images, or other saved content, but Pool focuses specifically on screenshots and then uses AI to help users rediscover and act on things they intended to revisit later.
Once imported, Pool is able to track down the original link associated with a given screenshot. For instance, if the screenshot was of a product you were thinking of buying, it would link to the retailer’s website. If it were a recipe you saw on Instagram, it could pull up the ingredients and instructions the creator had shared. And so on.
The idea, explained Pool co-founder Maxime Junique, came about because both he and his co-founder Piet Terheyden had faced the same problem: they would screenshot things they wanted to remember, but then could never find them again.
“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,” said Junique. The founders, who met years ago in a co-working space, asked their friends about the issue. The friends agreed that they would often screenshot and forget things, too, like design ideas or other types of inspiration.
The app was actually the first product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, the founders’ product and design studio, around three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over a couple of weeks while the founders lived out of a van, cranking out the landing page, website, and initial build. But they soon realized they needed to build some products that made money first, so they pivoted to B2B SaaS and shelved Pool.
The studio went on to build other products, including the CRM software Waitless, which was acquired last year.
What brought Pool back to life was the maturation of AI. Suddenly, its core idea of making sense of personal, largely unstructured datasets seemed feasible.
“We were like, it seems like a perfect time to go after this idea,” Junique told TechCrunch. “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 app also treats your screenshots like memories, meaning some of them are more relevant at the moment, while others disappear over time.
For example, if you screenshot the barcode to an event ticket, it could disappear later on after the event has taken place. Meanwhile, if you screenshot a flyer on Instagram about an upcoming event, Pool’s AI agents can help you find where to buy the tickets and link to the ticketing site.
To find things in Pool, you can search or ask its built-in AI assistant for help.
Next up, the founders plan to take this concept into a second, separate app that will operate as a personal assistant of sorts. Pool’s mascot — the little rubber duck you press and drag across the screen to enter Pool at launch — will become part of the brand for this agentic AI app they’re planning.
The founders were in Lisbon when we chatted — no longer in a van! — but headed to San Francisco in late May to meet with investors. The startup previously raised a pre-seed round of just over $2 million from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, Paris-based Source Ventures, and other angels, including Winston Du, Julian Blessin, and Thomas Ricouard.
Pool is available now as a free download on iOS.