ThisLife
Cloud-based image storing site that protects and organizes users' photos and videos in their own private archive in the cloud.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | investor | €0.0 | round |
| investor investor investor investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
ThisLife was a cloud-based photo and video management platform designed to centralize a user's entire visual library from multiple devices and online services. The company was founded in 2010 by the husband-and-wife team, Matt and Andrea Johnson, who served as CTO and CEO, respectively. The inspiration for the venture came from their personal experience as parents overwhelmed by the task of organizing their family's growing collection of digital memories, which were scattered across various devices, memory cards, and social networks.
The platform's core function was to aggregate photos and videos from a user's hard drive, phone, social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram, and other photo sites such as Picasa and Flickr, into a single, private, and secure cloud archive. ThisLife employed intelligent organization features, including facial recognition, duplicate detection, and location-based tagging, to automatically sort the imported media. The service presented these memories in an elegant, visually-driven timeline, allowing users to easily browse their life events chronologically. The business operated on a freemium model, offering a free plan with limited storage and paid subscription tiers for larger collections, which provided more extensive storage for photos and videos.
In June 2012, ThisLife secured $2.75 million in a seed funding round led by Madrona Venture Group. The company's trajectory culminated in its acquisition by Shutterfly in January 2013 for an undisclosed amount. Following the acquisition, the ThisLife team, including its founders, joined Shutterfly with the goal of integrating their technology into Shutterfly's platform. This strategic move was intended to combine ThisLife's organizational capabilities with Shutterfly's established product creation services, aiming to provide customers with a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for storing, organizing, sharing, and creating products from their digital memories.
Keywords: photo management, video storage, cloud storage, digital asset management, photo aggregation, Shutterfly acquisition, Andrea Johnson, Matt Johnson, facial recognition, photo organization, online photo sharing, freemium model, seed funding, Madrona Venture Group, digital memory archive, photo timeline, duplicate detection, mobile photo app, personal cloud, visual library