For years, your phone’s Camera Roll has served a dual purpose: a place for special moments, and an archive for everything you find online — recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, quotes, and products. A new app called Pool arrives this week to finally make sense of that digital clutter.
How Pool Works
Pool asks for permission to access your photos, then moves them into categories it calls pools. Those collections are entirely dependent on the products, places, or things you have saved, so each user’s pools are personal rather than pre-baked templates.
Once imported, Pool’s AI tracks down the original link behind a screenshot. A screenshot of a product leads back to the retailer’s site; a recipe captured from Instagram pulls up the ingredients and instructions the creator shared.
Taming Screenshot Clutter
The idea came from a problem both co-founders shared: they would screenshot things they wanted to remember, then never find them again. Friends agreed they did the same — capturing design ideas and inspiration and promptly forgetting them.
The app was the first product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, built in Lisbon over a couple of weeks while the founders lived out of a van. The studio eventually shelved Pool to build money-making products like the CRM Waitless, which was acquired last year.
Why AI Brought Pool Back
What revived Pool was the maturation of AI — making sense of a large, personal, largely unstructured dataset suddenly felt feasible.
- Memory-like behavior — some content is relevant now and fades later, like an event-ticket barcode after the event
- Action-oriented — a flyer for an upcoming Instagram event triggers links to where you can buy tickets
- Assistant-style search — find anything by searching or asking Pool’s built-in AI assistant
What Comes Next
The founders plan to carry the concept into a second, separate app that will operate as a personal assistant of sorts. Pool’s mascot — a rubber duck you drag across the screen to enter the app — will become part of the brand for that upcoming agentic AI app.
Pool previously raised a pre-seed of just over $2 million from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, and Paris-based Source Ventures. It is available now as a free download on iOS.