Co-Founder & CEO · Air
Shane Hegde
He never worked a day in marketing. So he recruited 100 CMOs to mentor him, called it a funding round, and built the filing cabinet that creative teams didn't know they needed.
He never worked a day in marketing. So he recruited 100 CMOs to mentor him, called it a funding round, and built the filing cabinet that creative teams didn't know they needed.
Ask Shane Hegde how he runs a company and he'll tell you about dinner. Kori Rotti, specifically, and Butter Chicken Sandwiches, made with spices his mother carries over from Mangalore. "Whether you're cooking or starting a company, you have to wing it," he says. "You're going to make a million mistakes, and they don't matter." It is an unusual operating philosophy for a founder who has raised more than $70 million. It is also, by the numbers, working.
Today Hegde is the co-founder and CEO of Air, a New York company that has spent the better part of a decade building one thing: a place for creative work to live. Not a folder. A system of record. Air now sits underneath more than 100,000 creatives across 2,100 businesses, quietly organizing over 120 million images, videos, and files that would otherwise be scattered across desktops, drives, and the bottom of someone's downloads folder.
The pitch is deceptively plain. Sales teams got Salesforce. Engineers got GitHub. Creative teams - the people making the ads, the campaigns, the brand - got a chaos of shared links and version-named files ending in "_FINAL_v3_REALLYfinal." Air is the answer to a question most companies didn't realize was a question: where does the creative actually go?
In January 2025, Air announced a $35M Series B led by Avenir. The interesting part isn't the number. It's the timing. Hegde raised it from a position most founders only describe in pitch decks: the company was roughly 60 days from profitability when the term sheet came in. "When you don't need money, you have optionality," he says, and the line lands because he had it.
The context behind that strength is its own story. In 2022, as the rest of the software world braced and bled, Air grew 240% while cutting 70% of its operating expenses by the fourth quarter. A 50% headcount reduction. A 90% cut to marketing spend. Triple-digit growth held through the downturn. Net dollar retention above 120%, CAC payback under twelve months. Hegde did not grow into the storm. He shrank, sharpened, and accelerated.
It's a strange thing to admire a founder for spending less. But the discipline is the differentiator. Plenty of companies grew fast in easy money. Air grew fast in hard money, then walked into a raise it could have walked away from.
Here is the detail that explains the rest of him. Hegde has never worked in marketing. For most CEOs selling to marketers, that would be a fatal gap to hide. He turned it into the strategy. Air's early capital came from roughly 100 former CMOs, creative directors, and brand founders - alumni of AllBirds, Harry's, HubSpot, SweetGreen. They didn't just write checks. Each one signed up for an hour a month of mentorship. He didn't buy money. He bought the marketing education he never had, and put it on the cap table.
Air began the way the good ones often do: two friends, the same frustration. Hegde met Tyler Strand in college; they were roommates, then best friends, then both working at the intersection of media and technology and both annoyed by the same thing - you could not work with creative teams in the cloud at scale. So in 2017 they built the cloud they wanted. Strand is CTO. Their one-on-one, the most important meeting at the company, is deliberately unstructured. No agenda. Hegde protects the friendship first and trusts the company to follow. It mostly has.
His path to that founding was anything but linear. He studied at Stanford, finishing in 2013. He cut his teeth as a TMT private equity investor at HPS Partners, learning how money reads a business. He co-founded a venture-backed fintech startup called Swap, where he was CEO. He ran digital strategy as Chief Digital Strategist at REVOLT Media & TV, helping build a multi-platform media company from the inside. Finance, founding, media. By the time he got to Air, he had seen content from every angle except the one that mattered most - the daily mess of making it. That outsider's view turned out to be the asset. He wasn't defending an old way of working because he'd never been wedded to one.
That mess is Hegde's whole thesis. "Every company will be a media company," he says, and he means it literally. "Regardless of industry, I think it's really important to get out and tell the story about your business. The way that companies do that today is with content. You can do that with images and videos, newsletters and blogs." Once you accept that, the question of where the content lives stops being an IT footnote and becomes the spine of the operation.
And the volume is about to break. Generative AI is turning every team into a firehose of images, clips, and drafts. Hegde sees the wave clearly: the surge of AI-made content needs software to manage, tag, and make sense of it at scale. Air isn't trying to out-store the old digital asset managers like Bynder or Canto. It's going after the root problem - the daily logistics of collecting, approving, and sharing - and positioning itself as the layer that organizes the flood before it drowns the people making it.
Hegde is careful about the words. Air is not, in his telling, a better Dropbox or a prettier asset library. It's the place where the work and everything around it - the feedback, the approvals, the versions, the comments timestamped to a single frame of video - all live in one indexed system. The analogy he reaches for is Salesforce. A sales rep doesn't keep deals in their head; they keep them in the system of record, and the system makes the team smarter than any one person on it. Air wants to be that for the people who make images and video. The daily logistics - collecting assets, routing them for approval, sharing them out - get automated so the creative work doesn't get lost between the people doing it.
That framing also explains who he isn't fighting. The incumbents in digital asset management built vaults: good at storing, slow at the messy human parts. Hegde decided the storage was table stakes and the workflow was the real problem. Tagging, search, facial recognition, transcription, version history, approvals - the unglamorous plumbing of getting creative from idea to live. Solve the logistics, he reasons, and the storage takes care of itself.
It's tempting to read the unstructured co-founder meeting as a quirk. It's closer to a design principle. Air's culture, in Hegde's framing, is built to enjoy the journey and honor the creative process - the same thing the product is supposed to protect for its customers. A company that tells creative teams "your process matters" while grinding its own people would be selling a lie. So the friendship with Strand sits at the center on purpose: keep that human and unhurried, and the rest of the organization inherits the temperature.
Which brings it back to the kitchen. He cooks Mangalorean food with his mother's spices and wings it on purpose, then runs his Fridays on a strict rhythm of hour-long one-on-ones with his team because that's how he likes to close the week. Improvise the vision, structure the follow-through. It is the same instinct that built a company in a downturn and raised a round it didn't need. Shane Hegde is comfortable not knowing the recipe. He's just very particular about the heat.
He turned his biggest weakness into his strategy. No marketing experience, so he made ~100 CMOs and brand founders his investors - each owing an hour a month of mentorship.
The most important sync at Air - his one-on-one with co-founder Tyler Strand - has no agenda on purpose. Protect the friendship; trust the company to follow.
2022: up 240%, expenses down 70%. He proved Air could accelerate while spending less, then raised a round he could have skipped.
Hour-long one-on-ones with direct reports, every Friday. It's how he likes to close the week - structure on the follow-through, improvisation on the vision.