To answer your question, here's the short version: Air is an agent for creative tasks that goes beyond a traditional DAM. It gives creative and marketing teams one place to organize their work, hold what's approved, and scale it across every channel.

It's a meaningful shift from where the company started, and it reflects how the whole market for managing creative work has changed.

This guide will give you an overview of what Air actually is today, where it fits across the creative tool stack, what a modern DAM should do, and how organized context plus reliable action adds up to an agent for creative work.

Air was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in New York City. The team spent years building a system of record for creative work and earned its name helping creative teams organize their files, then kept building as generative AI reshaped how content gets made.

Air was built for brands with a growing pile of visual content. These are typically organizations with 10 to 500 employees running lean creative and marketing teams, the kind that have outgrown Google Drive or Dropbox but don't want five separate tools to fill the gap.

More than 2,500 teams use Air to manage over 200 million assets, with 120,000 creatives on the platform daily. The company has raised north of $70 million from investors including Tiger Global, Avenir, and Lerer Hippeau.

Air is an agent for creative tasks that goes beyond a traditional DAM. The easiest way to understand the product today is through three verbs: understand, organize, scale.

Those three verbs map to concrete outcomes for a leaner in-house team:

• Understand: Air learns your brand from the assets, guidelines, and context you add, so it recognizes what's on-brand without you spelling it out each time.

• Organize: Your library stays structured and current, with search that works by describing what's inside a file rather than recalling its name.

• Scale: One approved design becomes every size, format, and channel you need, adapted inside the platform instead of rebuilt from scratch.

For a 60-person consumer brand, that might look like a social manager finding an approved fall campaign hero in seconds, then resizing it for six placements without pinging a designer.

The market has moved, and the old sales pitch of "here's a place to put your files" no longer answers what teams need.

No one's asking "what's a DAM" anymore. They're saying "our DAM isn't working": nobody uses it, no one can find the current version, it stores files without a workflow. A traditional DAM stores what you made. The harder, more valuable job is holding why you made it: the versions, approvals, and brand context that tell you which asset is safe to ship.

AI also changed the economics underneath all of this. When creation gets cheap and fast, producing assets stops being the bottleneck. The new bottleneck is finding what's approved and scaling what already works, which is exactly the part storage was never built for.

With that in mind, we've seen a few forces converging at once:

• Stack fatigue. Teams are tired of paying for five tools to do one job. A DAM that needs a whole stack bolted around it is a hard purchase to defend to finance.

• "DAM" and "DAM with AI" are merging. Evaluating a DAM now means judging its intelligence layer rather than its storage.

• The payoff shifted. The value is no longer retrieval. It's turning one approved asset into everything downstream, across every channel, without a designer starting over.

This is where Air's suite of features earn their keep (more on that below).

People shop for this kind of tool under a dozen different names, and none of them are strictly wrong. They're just different front doors into the same building, and DAM is the door most teams walk through first. The table below maps the categories Air shows up in, what each one actually means, and who tends to go looking there:

These categories all overlap because the underlying job hasn't changed: teams need one place to organize creative work, know what's approved, and scale it without starting over. What has changed is what a modern DAM should actually do to earn its place in that stack.

A current-generation DAM should do more than hold files neatly. The capabilities below are what a mid-market buyer should expect as standard, framed by the outcomes they produce rather than just the features on a spec sheet:

• Conversational search. Teams find assets by describing them in plain English, like "surfer photo at sunset," instead of recalling a filename. Under the hood, OCR reads text inside images and PDFs. Video transcription works across more than 100 languages, so a phrase someone said on camera becomes a searchable result.

• Auto-tagging and video intelligence. Assets get tagged on upload, so the library stays searchable without anyone manually labeling files. For video, transcripts, captions, and smart chapters turn a long clip into something you can search and reuse by jumping straight to the moment you need.

• Approval workflows. Reviews, sign-offs, and status all live in one place, so the team always knows what's current and what's cleared to ship. No more exporting from an outdated source file because the approval lived in someone's inbox.

• Brand context powering every edit. Stored brand guidelines—fonts, colors, logos, and usage rules—surface during editing, so adapted outputs stay on-brand without an extra review round. The rules travel with the work instead of living in a PDF nobody opens.

• AI agents that act on the library. This is where a modern DAM starts to feel less like a filing cabinet. Air can query the library directly and adapt approved assets in bulk through natural-language instructions, so a request like "resize these for every social placement" becomes a single step.

Taken together, this suite is the baseline a buyer should hold any DAM against in 2026.

The evolution comes down to one idea: a modern DAM is a place to organize and a place to act. Context makes action useful, because you can't adapt an asset safely if you don't know what's approved. Action then makes context worth keeping, because organized files that never get reused are just tidy dead weight.

So, put them together and you get an agent for creative tasks that turns one approved asset into everything downstream—the organizing, searching, versioning, and approvals build the agent's memory. Canvas and brand context then do the acting of adapting approved work across formats and channels without a rebuild.

For a buyer who needs to validate fit, a few practical points help:

• Pricing. Air runs on a credit-based model where storage, image editing, and video creation all draw from a monthly balance, and every plan includes unlimited seats. Nobody gets charged per user.

• Enterprise governance. SSO and SAML support central provisioning through Okta or Azure AD, custom roles set precise permissions, and audit logs track who accessed what and when.

• Proof of scale. More than 2,500 teams manage over 200 million assets on the platform.

What's next for mid-market teams? Book a personalized walkthrough to see how Air can help your team understand, organize, and scale your creative.

Air gives creative and marketing teams one visual workspace to organize assets, review and approve work, search by describing what's inside a file, and adapt approved creative for every channel. It keeps versions, approvals, and brand context tied to each asset so teams build on what works instead of remaking it.

Is Air a DAM?

Yes, and more. Air covers everything a digital asset management system should, including organizing, search, version control, approvals, and sharing. But it's built as an agent for creative tasks that goes beyond a traditional DAM, acting on your library rather than just storing it.

Who uses Air?

Air serves brands, retailers, media companies, nonprofits, and consumer businesses with a growing volume of visual content, typically organizations of 10 to 500 employees. Its users span creative leaders, designers, brand managers, and marketing teams who need one shared source of truth.

How is Air different from Google Drive and Dropbox?

Generic cloud storage treats a creative file like any other file, with no visual previews, no auto-tagging, and no approval workflow. Air is purpose-built for images, video, and design work, adding AI search, version stacking, brand context, and review and sign-off in one place.

Is Air free, and how does pricing work?

Air offers a free tier and runs on a credit-based model, where storage, image editing, and video creation all draw from a monthly credit balance. Every plan includes unlimited seats, so teams are never charged based on how many people use the workspace.