PastBook raises $250,000, helps you capture your digital memories

Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based PastBook has secured $250,000 in funding from Noro Venture Capital, Vidoze and a group of unnamed angel investors. The investment comes as the second portion of seed funding for the startup in the form of convertible notes.

PastBook received the first tranche of seed financing as part of the Amsterdam-based RockStart.Accelerator business acceleration program. The company was originally started in Milan but moved to the Dutch capital after its completion.

The startup’s service offers users a way to capture and relive important moments of their lives that were shared on a variety of social networks. Those ‘digital memories’ can be printed out in book form, as the company name suggests, but can also be centralized online or offline, as a PDF file.

There are a number of tools that help you rediscover your own memories through the digital trail left behind on social networks, photo sharing sites and whatnot (services like Timehop and Limetree spring to mind), which means PastBook emerges at a time when people are clearly starting to realize the value of culling through their personal, digitally-captured history to relive past moments.

PastBook says its eventual goal is to integrate all social networks, but has launched its beta version with Instagram for starters, enabling users to gather their photos in an online book by connecting the popular app to this dedicated web service.

A users’s PastBook can even include comments and likes on Instagram photos in a bid to make their digital memories more “vivid”.

Facebook integration is, unsurprisingly, next on the roadmap.

The startup’s founders, Stefano Cutello and Giuseppe Prioriello, will be visiting Silicon Valley this month to meet new investors and expand their network there.

A noteworthy side story: Cutello and Prioriello left two promising careers (one at eBay, one at a leading printing company) and their lives in Italy behind to go “all-in with PastBook”. During their first 5 months in Amsterdam, PastBook co-founders lived in 20 square-meter containers while their properties in Italy were put on sale.

➤ PastBook