Pool raises $2m to mine the screenshots you forgot you saved
A Lisbon-built iOS app wants to turn your camera roll of screenshots into a searchable memory bank. The pitch won over General Catalyst, but can it beat Google to it?
The News
Pool, an iOS app that automatically sorts your screenshots into searchable collections, has launched out of stealth with more than $2 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by General Catalyst, with Paris-based Kima Ventures and Source Ventures also writing cheques, alongside angels Winston Du, Julian Blessin and Thomas Ricouard.
The app, which went live on 11 June 2026 as a free iOS download, groups screenshots into themed sets it calls "pools". It tracks down the original web link behind a saved image and helps users resurface the products, recipes and travel ideas they meant to return to but never did.
Pool is the work of co-founders Maxime Junique and Piet Terheyden, who met years ago in a co-working space and built the product through their venture, Spinoff Studio. An early version was assembled roughly three years ago in Lisbon, then shelved until the underlying AI had matured enough to make the idea workable.
"Who is going after this really, deeply emotional dataset we all own?" Junique said of the screenshot piles sitting unexamined on millions of phones.
Why It Matters
The screenshot has quietly become the most honest record of what people actually care about: the flat you want to rent, the shoe you might buy, the recipe you swear you will cook. That makes it one of the few consumer datasets that is both vast and almost entirely unstructured, and founders now see it as fair game.
Pool is not first to the water. Google baked exactly this feature into its Pixel Screenshots app, shipped with the Pixel 9 in 2024, and Apple has pushed its own Visual Intelligence into the camera roll. When a two-person studio raises money to take on a capability the platform owners give away for free, the bet is that a focused product can out-execute a buried operating-system feature. That is the same wager that built Notion against Evernote, and it does not always pay off.
The pre-seed cheque is modest by 2026 standards, but the backers are not. General Catalyst's involvement signals that the "personal memory" category, long dismissed as a feature rather than a company, is being taken seriously again.
Indian Angle
If screenshots are an emotional dataset, India may be its largest single deposit. UPI now settles billions of transactions a month, and the payment confirmation screenshot has become a social and accounting ritual in its own right, forwarded to landlords, shopkeepers and family WhatsApp groups as proof of payment. The raw material Pool is chasing is arguably deeper in India than anywhere else.
The lead investor strengthens the connection. General Catalyst has spent the past few years building a serious India book, having absorbed the team behind Venture Highway, and backs the kind of consumer-internet companies for which screenshot behaviour is a daily reality. A bet on Pool is, indirectly, a bet on habits that show up most loudly on Indian phones.
The catch is distribution. Pool is iOS-only, and India remains an overwhelmingly Android market, with Apple's share still in the low single digits. For now, the country that might generate the richest screenshot trove cannot use the app at all. Whether Pool builds for Android, and how it handles the privacy of financial screenshots under India's Digital Personal Data Protection rules, will decide if any of that latent demand is reachable.
FAQ
How much did Pool raise and who led the round?
Pool raised more than $2 million in pre-seed funding. General Catalyst led the round, with participation from Kima Ventures and Source Ventures, plus angel investors Winston Du, Julian Blessin and Thomas Ricouard.
Can Indian users download Pool right now?
Not easily. Pool launched on 11 June 2026 as an iOS-only app, and India is an overwhelmingly Android market. Indian users would need an iPhone to try it, and there is no announced Android version yet.
How is this different from Google's Pixel Screenshots?
The core idea is similar: use AI to organise and search screenshots. The difference is that Pool is a standalone app rather than a feature tied to one phone brand, and it adds link-recovery and themed pools rather than a single timeline.
Where can I read the original announcement?
The launch was first reported by TechCrunch, whose coverage includes the founders' background and the full investor list. A link appears at the end of this article.
This story was reported by TechCrunch. Read the full original coverage at TechCrunch.