For years, your phone's Camera Roll has served dual purposes, helping you revisit special moments while also archiving various online finds like recipes, fashion inspirations, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, and product recommendations. Today, a new app called Pool has arrived to help you make sense of this digital clutter.
Getting started with Pool is simple: you grant it permission to access your photos, which are organized into categories it calls "pools." The pools created in the app depend entirely on the products, places, or things you've saved over time, making them specific to you. Pool is one of many apps reinventing bookmarking in the AI era. Startups like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop help users organize links, images, or other saved content, but Pool specifically focuses on screenshots and uses AI to help users rediscover and act on things they intended to revisit later, similar to apps like Captr or Sorti.
Once imported, Pool can track down the original link associated with a given screenshot. For instance, 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 shared by the creator. The idea, explained Pool co-founder Maxime Junique, emerged because both he and his co-founder Piet Terheyden faced the same problem: they would screenshot things they wanted to remember but could never find them again.
"It sounds pretty obvious when we say it, but it’s something we do so naturally—you don’t notice it, necessarily," Junique said. The founders asked their friends about the issue, and they agreed they often screenshot and forget things too, like design ideas or other types of inspiration.
The app was 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 profitable products 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 felt it was the perfect time to pursue this idea," Junique told TechCrunch. "And it also seemed to us like it's a super untapped, unexplored dataset for AI. Everyone goes after emails, bank transactions, chat logs—all of those productivity-first datasets. Who is going after this really, deeply emotional dataset we all own?"
Pool’s app also treats your screenshots like memories, meaning some are more relevant at the moment, while others fade away over time. For example, if you screenshot the barcode for an event ticket, it might disappear 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 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—not living in a van anymore!—but were 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.
Blogger's Review: The innovation of the Pool app lies in its combination of AI with personal data, addressing user pain points in the age of information overload and providing a personalized content management experience. This direction is worth watching, especially with the significant potential in personal assistants and intelligent recommendation fields.