Your Customers, For Life

Today's featured startup is transforming the way we save memories for future generations.

Apr 18, 2025

Autograph is a service for preserving family memories — with a twist. Behind the scenes is an AI historian named Walter, who helps users capture and record their stories.

There’s no app to download. Instead, Walter calls you and your family members once a week by phone, asking what happened during the week, what stood out, and how you felt about it.

Each conversation is saved in a secure family library. But the main value lies in Walter’s ability to sift through the recordings and turn them into stories — trimming the boring parts and leaving only what matters.

By default, these stories are visible only to the person who told them. But users can decide who else gets access and under what conditions — some stories can be made public right away, others only after the user’s death.

Family members can also access the stories by phone by calling a dedicated number. The voice on the other end? An AI that answers in your voice and pulls responses from your saved stories.

In essence, Autograph is building a kind of digital twin — a narrative-based AI version of yourself. In future versions, they plan to clone voices and rephrase stored content so that the AI can respond more naturally — while still staying true to the original personality.

Another use case: conversations between your present and past self. You can revisit past thoughts and feelings — which might be useful not just for nostalgia, but for reconnecting with goals and dreams that may have faded over time.

The service costs $30 per month per memory-recording user. That includes weekly calls with Walter, storage for your stories, and the ability to share them with loved ones.

Autograph launched last year and is currently in closed beta with a waitlist. A few days ago, the startup raised its first $2.6 million in funding.

What’s the Gist?

Family memory services are a niche market. No one really knows how big it is — but it definitely exists.

The key feature? Strong compounding effect. Once you start saving memories in a service like this, you’re less likely to cancel over time — simply because you don’t want to lose what’s already stored. Which means you could end up paying for it your entire life.

And if your kids don’t want to lose memories of you, they might keep paying after you’re gone. Then they start recording their own stories. Eventually, their kids take over. You get the idea.

So maybe it’s not the widest market — but it might be one of the longest. That’s why new startups keep popping up.

First, there’s Artifact — a service that records family memories podcast-style, using professional journalists and studio-level editing. It went through Y Combinator and raised $5M.

There’s also Remento, which started as a mobile app for recording memories and raised $3M in its first round. Later, they added printed memory books with QR codes linking to audio and video. In February, they raised another $300K from Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban.

Last year, a startup called Kinnect raised a small $100K round. It offered digital memory books with text, audio, and video — and later added physical printing too.

Each service has its own trick for helping people open up. Artifact uses pros, others offer templates and prompts, and Autograph has its own trained AI interviewer. These nudges are crucial — without them, most people wouldn’t record anything.

Autograph also stands out for enabling conversations with yourself. That makes it feel more like an interactive diary — something to talk to when you need to sort out your thoughts.

It’s a bit like SocialAI — the surprise hit app from last fall. It looks like Twitter, except you’re the only real person and everyone else is an AI bot. You pick your followers’ personalities — fan, hater, troll, optimist, realist, skeptic, etc. Then you post whatever’s on your mind and get feedback from your AI crowd.

Turns out, that kind of structured self-dialogue helps people get clarity too.

Key Takeaways

You could imagine a version of SocialAI — not as a text-based Twitter clone, but as a voice-first experience like today’s Autograph. It would be something like group therapy where you’re the only real person in the group. Walter could act as the moderator, pulling thoughts and details out of you in a live conversation, while the rest of the characters — voiced by AI — offer their perspectives and nudge you deeper into the dialogue.

That might even work better than a wall of text or written comments. For many people, speaking and listening is easier than typing and reading — and today’s AI is already quite good at talking, listening, and keeping a conversation going. In fact, sometimes it’s better at it than most real people.

As the founder of Boardy (a startup also working with voice-based AI) puts it, “2025 will be the year of conversational singularity” — meaning that talking to AI might soon become more pleasant than talking to actual humans. AI won’t get distracted, won’t lose track of the conversation, will catch every word you say, and will always have something kind, useful, or encouraging to say back.

In short, the big, inevitable direction for all of this is the creation of services that move us closer to conversational singularity — platforms that use AI companions not just to chat, but to help solve emotional, psychological, and everyday practical challenges.

One example? Riviera — a recent Y Combinator grad — built a voice-based AI hotel manager. It handles every single phone interaction with current and future guests, from helping them order room service to recommending nearby attractions.

Autograph has chosen a less “practical” use case — but any niche is a good niche, if it has real demand and makes money. So… what niche would you want to reach conversational singularity in? 😉 🚀

Company info:

Autograph

Website: https://www.autograph-ai.com/
Last funding round: $2.6 million, 14.04.2025
Total funds raised: €2.6 million after 1 round