The question that started it
In 2024, our founder's grandmother was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's. She was 81. Her son — the founder's father — asked him a question that stopped everything:
"What do you know about her that I never asked?"
— The question Heirloom was built to answer
He didn't have a good answer. None of us do, until we're asked. So we started recording her. Informal phone calls, once a week, fifteen minutes at a time. By month three, we had forty hours of her life — the village in Korea where she was born, the sister she lost in the war, the day she landed at JFK, the argument with her first boss, the song she sang to her children, the recipe she'd never written down.
She passed in 2025. Her voice is still here.
What we believe
Every life is a library
The stories, accents, hard-won wisdom, and private heartbreaks of one human being are a treasure no encyclopedia can replace. And every day, libraries close.
Voice is identity
Handwriting, photographs, video — all beautiful. But the voice of someone you loved is the closest thing to the person themselves. Preserving it is sacred work.
Consent is non-negotiable
No recording without informed consent. No voice cloning without explicit permission. No training public AI on your family's memories. Ever. These aren't features — they're our foundation.
Start before you think you need to
The most common phrase we hear from our users is: "I wish I had started sooner." So we built Heirloom to be as easy as a phone call, so no one ever says that to us.
AI that amplifies, not replaces
AI should transcribe, translate, organize, and help descendants ask better questions — not pretend to be the person who's gone. We build toward honest tools.
For every family, everywhere
Our question bank runs in nine languages. Our interface runs in nine more. Because this work is human, and humans live in every language.
The team
Heirloom is built by a small team with roots in Korea, the U.S., Brazil, and the Philippines — children of immigrants, grandchildren of survivors, parents who've lost parents. We've spent careers in AI, software, design, and family law. We know the work.
We are a remote-first team headquartered in Bergen County, New Jersey. We are backed by mission-aligned capital and guided by advisors in geriatrics, hospice, data ethics, estate law, and immigrant family services.
The numbers (so far)
| Metric | Today |
|---|---|
| Memoirs started | Growing — private beta data available on request |
| Languages supported | 9 (EN · KO · JA · ZH · ES · PT · FR · DE · TL) |
| Guided questions in the bank | 100+ across 6 life chapters |
| Average session length | 18 minutes |
| Most common first question | "What's a song you still know by heart from when you were a child?" |
What we don't do
- We don't sell your data.
- We don't train public AI on your memoir.
- We don't let you record someone without their consent.
- We don't pretend our AI is a person.
- We don't let family disputes override a subject's wishes.
See our Trust & Ethics page for the full commitments.
Start a memoir today. They'll thank you for the rest of your life.
Ten minutes. One question. That's how it starts.
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