figshare was launched in january 2011 by mark hahnel and has been supported by digital science since a january 2012 relaunch. hahnel first developed the platform as a personal custom solution for the organization and publication of diverse research products generated in support of his phd in stem cell biology. in january 2013 figshare announced a partnership with plos to integrate figshare data hosting, access, and visualization with their associated plos articles. in september 2013, the service launched an institutional repository service, which offers organizations a pre-developed infrastructure for hosting academic materials generated by their member communities. in december 2013, they announced integration with impactstory to support the collection of altmetrics. figshare made 200,000 files publicly available in its first year, which grew to approximately one million objects by september 2013.