PastMap Briefings
A daily AI briefing for journalists, diplomats, and policy analysts that maps current geopolitical hotspots against the historical conflicts that shaped them.
Journalists and policy analysts writing about conflict regions
- Daily 2-minute 'historical context' briefing auto-attached to current events from regions like the Sahel, Caucasus, and South China Sea
- Annotated conflict map with timeline scrubber showing how today's borders and alliances trace back centuries
- Export-ready research packs with citations to primary sources for use in articles and briefs
- Watchlist alerts when a location enters a historical-conflict recurrence window
War Atlas surfaced the gap between hobby-grade history maps and the kind of contextualized geopolitical briefing professionals actually need — and AI makes daily production feasible for a small team.
Strong adjacent demand: Semafor runs paid email briefings, Axios markets multi-newsletter subscriptions, and Eurasia Group sells geopolitical analysis to professionals, but the specific 'historical-conflict-overlay-on-today' angle is unproven with end users.Semafor - Email Briefings ↗Eurasia Group | Home ↗
War Atlas itself is explicitly a free hobby-grade reference; mainline geopolitical risk vendors (Stratfor/Eurasia/Control Risks) cover present-day risk but rarely pair each hotspot with its deep historical war atlas. DiploAI targets the diplomatic workflow but not the journalist/analyst historical-context niche.War Atlas — Every Named War in Human History ↗Diplo AI Tools & Ecosystem: 30 years of innovation for diplomats ↗
Proven willingness to pay in adjacent categories (Semafor Flagship, Eurasia Group, Foreign Affairs) at $50–several-hundred/year for individuals and team seats in the thousands; a B2B-first angle targeting newsrooms and think tanks maps cleanly onto existing budgets.Axios — Newsletters ↗Eurasia Group | For the Media ↗
Demand for conflict/regime-risk analysis is structural and not cyclical, the underlying historical corpus (10,584 conflicts, 427 empires per War Atlas) is permanent reference data, and recurring daily-briefing format drives durable subscription retention.War Atlas maps every named conflict in human history interactively ↗
MVP is achievable for a small team: curated historical corpus plus RAG over current news is straightforward, but high-stakes accuracy (journalists will be quoted on it) means a human-in-the-loop editorial layer is non-trivial and not purely LLM-call-and-ship.War History Map — 3,500 Years of Armed Conflicts ↗