For years, your phone’s camera roll has served two purposes. In addition to helping you relive special moments, it has also served as a repository for all sorts of things you find online, such as recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations and more. Today, a new app called Pool arrives to help you finally make sense of this digital mess.
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 completely dependent on the products, places or things you’ve saved over time, making them specific to you.
The app is one of many reinventing bookmarks 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 the original link attached to a given screenshot. For example, if the screenshot was of a product you were considering buying, it would link to the retailer’s website. If it was 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 we do so naturally — you don’t necessarily notice it,” Junique said. The founders, who met years ago in a co-working space, asked their friends about the problem. The friends agreed that they would often screenshot and also forget things, e.g. design ideas or other forms of inspiration.
The app was actually the first product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, the founders’ product and design studio, about three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over the course of a few weeks, while the founders lived out of a van, putting out the landing page, website and initial construction. But they quickly realized they needed to build some products that made money first, so they switched to B2B SaaS and shelved Pool.
The studio went on to build other products, including 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 data sets seemed feasible.
“We thought it seemed 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’s going after emails, bank transactions, chat logs—all these productivity-first data sets. Who’s going after this really, deeply emotional data set that we all have?”
Pool’s app also treats your screenshots as memories, meaning some of them are more relevant in the moment, while others disappear over time.
For example, if you screenshot the barcode of an event ticket, it may disappear later 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 website.
To find things in Pool, you can search or ask its built-in AI assistant for help.
Next, the founders plan to take this concept into another, separate app that will act as a kind of personal assistant. Pool’s mascot — the little rubber duck you tap and drag across the screen to enter Pool at launch — will be part of the brand for this agent AI app they’re planning.
The founders were in Lisbon when we chatted – no longer in a van! — but went 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.
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