Space raises $2.4 million pre-seed led by a16z Speedrun
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Space, founded by Matthew Ao, Arihant Bapna and Jason Zhao, said it is building a distributed filesystem designed to make cloud-hosted files accessible without relying on local storage. The company positioned the effort around giving humans and AI agents access to the same live data when it is needed.
Space linked the work to ongoing constraints in workflow execution caused by limited disk capacity on individual devices. It said that data movement and replication—such as uploading, downloading, syncing, duplicating, and searching for files—has remained necessary before work can start, including for agentic workflows that depend on separate ingestion or indexing steps.
Functionally, Space described a filesystem built directly above the operating system, intended to make cloud-hosted files behave like local ones. The company said files appear in Finder and open in existing native applications without a download or permanent local copy, and it said the system streams only the byte ranges required by an application or agent request in real time.
Space announced a $2.4 million pre-seed round led by a16z Speedrun, with participation from Golden Ventures, Northside Ventures, and a dozen angel investors. The company said it is in private beta with roughly 100 users and teams onboarded. “Humans and agents are working across more data than any local disk can hold. They should not have to wait for files to be copied or ingested before work can begin,” said Jason Zhao, Co-Founder of Space.
“The filesystem is the layer shared by every application, device, user, and agent. Rebuilding it around live, distributed data makes every workflow above it faster,” said Arihant Bapna, Co-Founder of Space. “The computer no longer needs to hold every file. It becomes a window into any file, wherever it lives and however large it is,” said Matthew Ao, Co-Founder of Space. Space said it planned to begin with teams whose workflows exceed local disk limits and then expand into additional AI-native companies and data-intensive workflows, with the longer-term vision described as the Space Computer, or the infinite computer.
Press release, originally published at Globe Newswire.