Cloud computing has transformed the way both individuals and organisations work with technology. But while the cloud makes it possible to store endless files of any size in a secure and accessible environment, it also creates a problem that is often overlooked: moving files to and from the cloud can be a hugely time-consuming process.

San Francisco-based Space , which is today announcing a $2.4 million pre-seed funding round, says this issue has become deeply troubling for many businesses, with workflows disrupted and delayed as they wait for file transfers. In extreme cases, explains Jason Zhao, the co-founder of Space, businesses find it quicker to have a filed shipped to them over hundreds or even thousands of miles on a physical storage device than to download it from the cloud.

“The industry has spent decades optimizing where data is stored, but the harder problem is making it instantly accessible to those who need it,” explains Zhao. “As companies manage ever-larger design files, codebases, datasets and media libraries across various clouds, drives and devices, traditional storage still forces entire files to be moved in full before work can begin.”

Space’s solution is a new type of file management system, operating on users’ own computers but providing instant access to their cloud-stored files. Zhao says the system is broadly analogous to streaming a film from Netflix, say, where viewers don’t have to wait until the whole movie is downloaded before they start watching it. The idea is to move towards an “infinite computer”, which provides instantaneous access to never-ending storage space.

The start-up, launched last year by Zhao and co-founders Matthew Ao and Arihant Bapna, has already begun to sign up paying customers. It’s targeting sectors such as video content production and computer-aided design, where users are working with especially large files and therefore dealing with frustrating upload and download times. The company also sells its technology to “prosumers” – individual users suffering similar problems in areas such as the influencer market.

“Cloud storage gave us somewhere else to put our files, but it never made them feel truly local,” adds Ao. “We are making the file system itself behave as a local drive would but distributed, so every device, teammate and agent can reach the same data the moment it is needed. This way the computer becomes a window into the files instead of the container that holds them.”

Ao’s use of the word “agent” is important. One bet that Space is making is that as the agentic artificial intelligence movement gathers pace, agents will begin to suffer with the same sort of problems as humans waiting for data to move to and from the cloud – and that this will be a significant brake on the productivity and value creation benefits that agentic AI is supposed to deliver. In which case, Space’s solution could prove to be even more valuable.

Jonathan Lai, general partner at a16z Speedrun, which is leading the pre-seed round, thinks that’s a smart view. “Matt, Ari, and Jason are innovating with a new type of AI-native file system that can serve both human creators and AI agents with the same primitive: instant access to the exact data they need,” he says. “Space is disrupting one of the oldest assumptions in computing: that a file has to exist on your device before you work with it.”

It’s a vision that is backed by Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures, which are also participating in the round, alongside around a dozen angel investors with backgrounds across software companies such as Parsec, Stan, Superwhisper, Modem, and Sentry. The funding will be used for further technology development, including new engineer hires, Space explains, as the company works towards a preliminary target of hitting 10,000 paying users.

Not that the company has the market completely to itself. Rivals such as Canada’s Spacedrive, which has previously raised $2 million of funding, and San Francisco peer Byteport, a Y Combinator backed start-up, are exploring their own solutions to the file sharing and access challenge.

But the good news for disruptors in this market is that the big players in the tech sector – both cloud storage companies and established file sharing businesses – have so far not developed their own products in this area. One reason for this, Zhao suggests, is that internet speeds have only recently become rapid enough for solutions such as Space’s streaming-style technology to be practical.

The opportunity is potentially huge. The cloud storage market is worth around $180 billion this year according to research from Mordor Intelligence but is set to grow at rates of more than 20% a year to be worth more than $500 billion by 2031. In this world, argues Bapna, access to your files will become ever more important, with the idea of the infinite computer moving center stage. “The future of storage will not belong to whoever stores a gigabyte cheapest,” he says. “It will belong to whoever makes data usable the instant a person or agent reaches for it.”