Andreessen Horowitz accelerator a16z Speedrun led the pre-seed round for the U.S.-incorporated startup, with participation from Toronto funds Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures, as well as angel investors. Space will use the new money to add to its engineering team and for sales and marketing, said co-founder Jason Zhao. (The Logic)

Talking point: Torontonians Zhao, Matthew Ao and Arihant Bapna co-founded the firm in May after running into file storage and speed issues at their last startup, an AI content platform. Most cloud services require that users download their data to work with it in applications. “You don’t have instant access—you still have to wait,” Zhao said. Space’s technology senses what parts of a file an application needs to use, then streams just that from the cloud, so it feels near-instant. The firm is initially targeting creative and marketing teams working with videos and other large media files, but plans to expand to engineering, simulation and other types of work with large datasets. It also expects its market to grow as AI agents take on more tasks; since they typically work faster than humans, they’ll hit the file lag problem sooner, Ao said.

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