Invest / Investor brief
Humankind
Keep the voice, stories, and values of someone you love, with every answer showing whether it was said, pieced together, or guessed.
Most families lose the texture of a person within two generations. The tools that try to keep it either print a book or build a chatbot that pretends to be someone. Humankind is a private, consent-first archive where a person and their family gather voice, stories, and memories, and where every answer drawn from that archive is labelled as recorded, reconstructed, or speculative.
The problem
Photo apps and family trees keep names, dates, and pictures. They do not keep how someone told a story, what they found funny, or what they would say to a grandchild. That is usually gone one or two generations later, and often much sooner when memory starts to fade.
- Adult children of ageing parents They want to capture stories and a voice while there is still time, often right after a diagnosis such as dementia.
- Families spread across countries Grandchildren who meet their grandparents a few times a year, if at all.
- People facing serious illness They want to leave something truthful behind, on their own terms.
- Care homes and hospices They already run reminiscence and life-story work by hand. The results are rarely kept in a form anyone can use later.
The product
The application is built: an Elixir and Phoenix LiveView app with Rust for audio, cryptography, image processing, and local embeddings.
- A living archive Text, audio, video, and photos, with transcription and guided prompts that suggest which memories are still missing.
- Shared spaces Family members contribute their own memories, with attribution, and guardians who can look after an archive.
- A grounded persona Conversations drawn only from the archive, with lenses for how a person speaks to a grandchild or to a student.
- Voice, if consented Optional voice synthesis from the person’s own recordings, behind its own consent scope.
- Stories Narratives built from cited memories, exported as PDF or Markdown.
- Yours to take Encryption at rest, full deletion, and an export of the whole archive.
The market
Market reports disagree, and some count digital estate management as “digital legacy”, so these figures are context rather than the market Humankind addresses. The direction is consistent: people spend real money on keeping family memory, and the category is growing.
- USD 15 to 25 bn Global digital legacy market in 2025, growing about 14 to 16 percent a year. Mordor Intelligence, Precedence Research
- USD 7.3 bn Genealogy products and services in 2025, forecast at USD 16.6 bn by 2032. Kings Research
- 104 m Registered users at MyHeritage alone: family memory is a mass market. Calcalist
Why now
- 22 % Share of the EU population aged 65 or older in 2025, and rising every year. Eurostat
- 57 m People living with dementia worldwide, with nearly 10 million new cases a year. Memory has to be captured before it fades. WHO via NIHR
- 281 m International migrants in 2024. Families live further apart than ever. IOM World Migration Report
- Aug 2026 EU AI Act transparency duties for chatbots and synthetic voice now apply. Humankind discloses by design. Cooley
Transcription, retrieval, and voice synthesis have also become cheap enough that a small team can build what took funded companies years.
What sets it apart
- Every answer shows where it comes from Each memory and each answer is labelled recorded, reconstructed, or speculative, and a separate check audits generated text against its sources. Truth over fluency.
- Consent you can audit Consent records are append-only and versioned, with separate scopes for data processing, persona conversations, stories, and voice. Nothing is overwritten.
- A family archive, not a solo recording Several people contribute to one archive, each with attribution, and guardians cannot rewrite where a memory came from.
- The persona never claims to be the person It says what it is, will not invent memories, and is built for preservation, not resurrection.
- Useful while the person is alive Families share stories in circles today. Humankind is not only for after someone has died.
Competition
| Company | What they do | How Humankind differs |
|---|---|---|
| StoryWorth | Weekly email prompts that become a printed book | Keeps voice and media, takes contributions from the whole family, and adds a persona with provenance |
| Remento | Spoken stories turned into books | A living archive, not only a book; every answer cites its sources |
| HereAfter AI | Interview-based life-story avatar in the person’s voice | Recorded, reconstructed, and speculative material is labelled; consent scopes and guardians |
| StoryFile | Video question and answer avatars; filed for Chapter 11 in 2024 | Low-cost asynchronous capture and a full export, so the archive does not depend on the company |
| Project December | Chatbots built from a questionnaire about anyone | No persona without the subject’s consent or a guardian’s |
| Ancestry, MyHeritage | Family trees, records, DNA | Complementary: they record who someone was related to, Humankind records who someone was |
Business model
- Free One archive and limited conversations, so a family can start without a decision.
- Pro Unlimited archives, voice, and story export.
- Family Shared spaces for everyone who wants to contribute.
- Capture packages A one-off package when a diagnosis comes and time matters.
- Care partnerships Pilots with hospices, care homes, and dementia charities that already do life-story work.
- Preservation A paid long-term tier with a guaranteed export and archive escrow.
The free, pro, and family tiers are planned in the product roadmap. Capture packages, care partnerships, and the preservation tier are the next options to test with families.
Where it stands
- The application is built and tested: archive, consent, encryption, provenance, persona, voice, stories, and sharing.
- The website is live with a waitlist for early access.
- Next: production deployment in a Swiss or EU region, then a closed beta with families from the waitlist.
There are no paying users yet. This is an early ticket into a product that exists, before the market has seen it.
Risks
- Emotional harm Research on “deadbots” warns of manipulation and dependency. Humankind requires consent, rules out addictive patterns and advertising, and will add ways to retire a persona with dignity.
- Public scepticism Many people reject AI recreations of the dead. Humankind is positioned on preservation and on sharing while alive, not on talking to the dead.
- Regulation Rules for data of deceased people differ by country, and the AI Act requires disclosure. Guardians with a documented scope and a self-disclosing persona answer both.
- Longevity A memory company that disappears takes the memories with it. Full export exists today; open formats and escrow are planned.
What funding would do
- Launch Production deployment in a Swiss or EU region, with backups and monitoring.
- Closed beta Families from the waitlist, and structured interviews about what they keep and why.
- Care pilots One or two hospices or care organisations, run with an ethics advisor.
- Billing The free, pro, and family tiers.
- Trust An AI Act compliance pass for synthetic voice, open export formats, and archive escrow.
- Mobile capture An app for recording voice and stories offline, where the conversations happen.