Historypin CIC

What Historypin CIC does

Historypin CIC is a London-based non-profit Community Interest Company founded in 2009 and operated under the umbrella of Shift Collective (with Shift Design, Inc as the copyright holder). It runs a community-driven digital heritage platform that enables individuals, cultural institutions, and educators to pin photos, audio, video, and text stories to specific geographic locations on a world map and to assemble those pins into curated, themed collections. The platform supports multi-media input, collaborative collection-building, and account types tailored to community archives, libraries/museums, and educators/students, with content spanning themes such as the First World War centenary, LGBTQ heritage, local community memories, and national-cultural initiatives.

The underlying technology is a web platform integrating Google Maps for geotagging, with two primary content primitives (Pins and Collections) and no public-facing API, SDK, or developer documentation identified. Over 112,000 registered members have contributed to more than 45,000 collections, with flagship contributions from the US National Archives, Library of Congress, National Park Service, Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the BBC, and national libraries in Colombia, Australia, and Canada.

The business model is a hybrid of freemium platform access, paid organizational plans (annual subscription with personalized support, pricing not publicly disclosed), and donations routed through Givebutter, supplemented by grants from bodies such as the Knight Foundation and Heritage Lottery Fund. Go-to-market is community-led and partnership-driven: distribution flows through institutional partners whose themed collections and broadcast tie-ins (e.g., BBC FOUR's People's History of Pop series) drive audience acquisition. The company has 11-50 employees, no disclosed venture funding beyond a single $250,000 Knight Foundation grant in 2017, and serves users globally with documented activity in the UK, US, Colombia, Australia, and Canada.

Name

Historypin CIC

Legal name

Historypin CIC

Website

https://historypin.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

2009

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Historypin CIC is a London-based non-profit that operates a community-driven digital heritage platform, enabling users worldwide to pin photos, audio, video, and stories to geographic locations and build themed heritage collections in partnership with cultural institutions, educators, and community groups.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Digital Heritage Platform

NAICS

Libraries and Archives (51921), Libraries and Archives (519210)

SIC

Miscellaneous Publishing (2741), Services-Membership Organizations (8600)

akta.pro primary industry

Public Media Archives, Libraries & Content Preservation (MPABADAL)

akta.pro secondary industry

Access & Distribution for Archives (Restored Masters, DCP Creation, Screening Deliverables) (MPADAMAJ)

Keywords

• Digital heritage platform
• Community-driven storytelling
• Geotagged historical content
• Cultural memory preservation
• Collaborative history mapping

Headquarters

HQ city

London

HQ country

United Kingdom

HQ region

Europe

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Freemium Platform Access: The platform offers free basic tools for individual users to pin and share community history, while advanced plans with additional features are available for organizations and institutions requiring enhanced capabilities.
2. Donations: Historypin accepts donations through givebutter.com to support the platform and its mission of bringing cultural memory to life.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels4 records

Core offering

Historypin CIC operates a community-driven web platform where users pin photos, audio, and video to specific geographic locations on a world map to document and share local history and cultural heritage. The platform enables individuals, communities, libraries, archives, museums, and educators to create collaborative themed collections of geotagged historical media. The service is offered free for basic use, with paid subscription plans available to organizations needing advanced features and personalized support.

Product overview

Historypin is a single, unified community-driven digital heritage platform. Its core product is the Historypin website/app, which enables users to share photos, sound, or video geotagged to a world map to tell stories of places that matter to them. The platform centers on two primary content units: individual 'Pins' (geotagged historical media items) and 'Collections' (curated groupings of pins, sometimes organized around themes or community projects). The platform supports multiple media types (image, audio, video, text), collaborative creation, and both free and paid account tiers for individuals, community groups, libraries, archives, museums, schools, and businesses. No distinct sub-brands, acquired products, or separate module names were identified beyond the core platform itself.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Shift Collective: The non-profit organization behind Historypin, supporting the platform's mission to bring cultural memory to life.

Products and services

• Historypin Platform A community-driven web platform where people share photos, sound, or video to tell stories of places that matter to them. Users pin historical media to a world map via Google Maps integration and build collaborative themed collections. The platform serves individuals, community groups, libraries, archives, museums, schools, and businesses through free basic access and advanced paid plans with personalized support.

Named customers14 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration1 record

Partnerships

Eleven partnerships are on record, tiered core and flagship.

• Shift CollectivecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2009Shift Collective is the non-profit organization behind Historypin. Historypin was created in 2009 to inspire people to take photographs out of storage boxes and help bring cultural memory to life. Shift Collective provides organizational backing and mission direction for the platform.
• Biblioteca Nacional de ColombiaflagshipStrategic or Co-development PartnerThe National Library of Colombia created Comparte Tu Rollo, a Colombia-specific adaptation of the Historypin platform, as a project of the Ministry of Culture. This initiative motivates public libraries, archives, universities, and community groups to share historical photographs and stories online. The collection contains over 6,445 pins documenting Colombian cultural heritage.
• National Park Service (NPS)flagshipStrategic or Co-development PartnerThe National Park Service partnered with Historypin for the LGBTQ America collection as part of the NPS centennial (2016) effort to tell a fuller, more inclusive American history. Working with Quist and the Rainbow Heritage Network, the NPS seeks to make places of LGBTQ heritage more visible through the platform.
• BBCflagshipStrategic or Co-development PartnerThe BBC partnered with Historypin for the People's History of Pop crowdsourcing project. The BBC is collecting photos, ticket stubs, teen diary entries, recordings, wristbands, and rare footage from the public to tell the stories of British rock and pop music from the 1950s to the noughties. A television series for BBC FOUR featured content from the platform.
• Heritage Lottery FundcoreGTM or Marketing PartnerThe Heritage Lottery Fund provided funding for the First World War Centenary hub and the King's Cross Story Palace project. As a funding partner, they support the platform's ability to create commemorative projects around UK heritage.
• Imperial War MuseumscoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerImperial War Museums partnered in creating the First World War Centenary hub on Historypin, providing expertise and content for commemorating WWI impact on communities.
• Arts and Humanities Research CouncilcoreGTM or Marketing PartnerAHRC partnered on the First World War Centenary hub, contributing research expertise and academic perspective to the digital humanities project.
• JISCcoreTechnology or IntegrationJISC partnered on the First World War Centenary hub, contributing technical expertise for digital heritage and scholarly communication infrastructure.
• Tyne & Wear Archives & MuseumscoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerTyne & Wear Archives & Museums partnered with Leeds Library & Information Service and Norfolk Library & Information Service on the Historypin Connections project, funded by the Big Lottery Accelerating Ideas programme. The project shares local stories and creates social connections across UK communities.
• US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)flagshipStrategic or Co-development PartnerNARA created the Remembering WWI collection on Historypin to commemorate the centennial of US entering WWI in 2017. The collection includes newly digitized and remastered films and images from the US Signal Corps, with contributions from Library of Congress and Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
• Google MapscoreTechnology or IntegrationHistorypin integrates with Google Maps to enable users to pin historical content to geographic locations, providing the mapping infrastructure for the platform's location-based heritage documentation.

Scale indicators5 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Wikimedia Commons: Wikimedia Commons is a free, community-contributed digital archive of media files that closely mirrors Historypin's model of crowdsourced heritage content. Both platforms serve individuals and cultural institutions contributing photographs, audio, and video for public educational use, with overlapping community audiences.
• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): DPLA aggregates digital collections from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States into a single discovery portal. It is highly comparable as a heritage aggregation platform serving the same library, archive, and museum customer segments that Historypin targets.
• Europeana: Europeana is the EU-funded digital heritage platform aggregating content from European libraries, museums, and archives. It overlaps directly with Historypin in mission, customer base, and content model, and operates at a much larger institutional scale.
• Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library archiving websites, audio, video, and texts, including historical media. It is directly comparable as a free, mission-driven platform preserving cultural heritage and serving researchers, educators, and the general public in the same way Historypin does.
• PastVu: PastVu is a community-driven platform for sharing historical photographs pinned to geographic locations, with a strong user base in Russia and Eastern Europe. It is one of the closest functional analogues to Historypin, using a map-based crowdsourcing model for community heritage.

Regional players

• Trove (National Library of Australia): Trove is a single-search portal aggregating Australian library, archive, and museum content including digitized historical photographs and oral histories. It is comparable as a national-scale heritage aggregation platform but operates primarily within Australia rather than globally like Historypin.

Others

• OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap is a community-built geographic database that Historypin conceptually depends on for location accuracy. It is comparable as an adjacent enabling infrastructure for community-contributed, geotagged content, although its core offering is mapping data rather than heritage storytelling.

Emerging players

• FamilySearch: FamilySearch is a free genealogy and family history platform with crowdsourced photos, records, and stories tied to ancestors and locations. It overlaps with Historypin's community-driven, location-based personal and family heritage documentation use case, particularly for individual contributors.

Broad incumbents

• Google Arts & Culture: Google Arts & Culture partners with thousands of museums and cultural institutions to digitize and publish high-resolution cultural content. It is comparable as a broader incumbent operating in the same digital heritage space, with vastly greater resources but a less community-contributed, more curated editorial model.
• Flickr Commons: Flickr Commons was a partnership program with cultural institutions to share historical photographs with no known copyright restrictions. It is comparable as a photo-sharing heritage platform serving the same institutional customer segments, although Flickr's broader consumer focus makes it a broader incumbent rather than a direct specialist.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/historypin
• Facebookfacebook.com/historypin

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds2 records

Investors1 record

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Historypin CIC