Like many big ideas, FutureVault started on the back of a napkin in 2013, ironically with an inclination towards getting away from using paper. But first, let us back up a bit. FutureVault was founded by three colleagues who collectively had spent decades in technology, media, and finance. They had worked together for a number of years at a large, publicly-traded Internet television technology company that had streamed petabytes of content and data to consumers around the world for large media companies. Further, they were actively engaged in the North American startup community from an advisory and investment perspective and were closely monitoring a number of macro and discrete trends within the worlds of online streaming, the sharing economy, cloud storage, and related services, FinTech and AI. They founded a technology incubator called SB2 Group with a mission of building applications and technology that would add meaning, value, and simplicity in our quickly evolving technology-driven world.

Across these and other sectors a common theme emerged – our digital lives had become too complicated, overwhelming and stressful. Despite technology empowering, connecting and entertaining our society like never before, it came at a tremendous cost – information overload. Information was flowing through our televisions, radios, computers (at work and at home), digital billboards, and now our tablets and smartphones and other connected devices.

Consumers began creating and distributing more content than ever before from social media, user-generated content, and video streaming to the digital transformation of documentation and the recording and transmission of big data. In fact, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google was quoted in 2010 saying, “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.”