For years, your phone’s Camera Roll has served two purposes. In addition to helping you revisit special moments, it has also served as a repository for all kinds of things you find online, such as recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations, and more. Today, a new application is called Pool arrives to help you finally make sense of this digital clutter.
To start with Poolyou simply give it permission to access your photos, which are moved into categories it calls “pools.” The groups created in the app are entirely dependent on the products, places or things you’ve saved over time, making them specific to you.
The app is one of many reinventing bookmarking in the age of artificial intelligence. Startups like my mind, Fabricand Trickle help users organize links, images or other saved content, but Pool specifically focuses on screenshots and then uses AI to help users rediscover and act on what they intended to revisit later.
Once imported, Pool can locate the original link associated with 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 gather the ingredients and instructions shared by the creator. And so on.
The idea, Pool co-founder explained Maxime Juniquecame about because both he and his co-founder Piet Terheyden they had faced the same problem: they took screenshots of things they wanted to remember, but then couldn’t find them again.
“It sounds pretty obvious, right now, when we say it, but it’s something we do naturally — you don’t notice it, necessarily,” Junique said. The founders, who met years ago in a co-working space, asked their friends about it. The friends agreed that they would often screen capture and forget things like design ideas or other types of inspiration.
The app was actually the first product to come out Spinoff Studiothe founders’ product and design studio, about three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over a few weeks while the founders lived out of a van, creating the landing page, website and initial build. But they soon realized they needed to build some products that would make money first, so they switched to B2B SaaS and left Pool.
The studio went on to make other products, including CRM software Waitingwhich was acquired last year.
What brought Pool back to life was the maturation of the AI. Suddenly, his basic idea of making sense of personal, largely unstructured data sets seemed feasible.
“We were, it seems like the perfect time to pursue this idea,” Junique told TechCrunch. “And it also seemed to us that it’s a hugely untapped, unexplored data set for AI. Everyone’s looking at emails, banking, chat logs—all these early productivity data sets. Who’s going after this really, deeply emotional data set that we all have?”
The Pool app also treats your screenshots like memories, meaning some of them are more relevant in the moment, while others fade away over time.
For example, if you screenshot the barcode on an event ticket, it could disappear later after the event takes place. Meanwhile, if you screenshot an Instagram flyer about an upcoming event, Pool’s AI agents can help you find where to buy tickets and link you to the ticketing website.
To find things in the Pool, you can search or ask for help from the built-in AI assistant.
Next, the founders plan to take this idea into a second, separate app that will act as a personal assistant. The Pool mascot – the little rubber duck you tap and drag on the screen to enter the Pool at launch – will become part of the branding for this AI agent app they’re designing.
The founders were in Lisbon when we chatted — no more 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 Paris-based General Catalyst Kima Ventures Source Venturesand other angels, including Winston Du, Julian Blessin and Thomas Ricouard.
The pool is now available as a free download on ios.
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