When families gather for holiday parties or reunions, relatives have the chance to spin tales of their past from one generation to the next. However, these bonding opportunities may be few and far between, leaving countless stories untold. Remento wants to help facilitate more of these invaluable family conversations through its mobile storytelling app.
Created to help share the stories that keepsakes and photo albums can’t show on their own, Remento provides families with a shared digital platform to store timeless conversations. The company announced a $3 million seed funding round led by Upfront Ventures on Thursday alongside the launch of its iOS app.
The platform operated in beta for the past year, serving a user base of 1,000 people, according to the company.
Remento’s earliest form was developed for CEO and co-founder Charlie Greene’s own family. After losing his father at a young age, Greene often found himself longing to hear his dad’s voice. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, Greene quickly thought to use his media and tech experience to capture her story.
The resulting solution would combine a series of recorded conversations prompted by family photos and online questions. Those recordings could be placed on a shared digital timeline that family members could access and add to down the line.
“Our team has created Remento to bring an experience that changed my relationship with my mom — and indeed my entire life — into the lives of others,” Greene said. “As we sat down to record my mom’s story, I realized that this was about to be one of the best investments that we could have ever made with our time.”
Today Remento works to help people better understand and appreciate their family’s stories. Users have in-person conversations based on family photos and sequenced prompts and questions from the app, which are developed by a team of memory researchers and neuroscientists to help guide meaningful storytelling. For instance, the questions it would suggest for a family member with Alzheimer’s differ from those it would display for a person with full cognitive abilities.
“For some people, being asked to tell you their story is their Hollywood moment, and it’s met with tremendous excitement. And for others, there’s a little bit more modesty and it takes a little bit more work,” Greene said. “That’s why the platform is specifically tailored to different attributes and characteristics of the person that you’re speaking with.”
From there, Remento helps users record, organize and share digital stories with other members of the family. Part of the company’s new funding round will go toward finding areas where artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing tech can further streamline these capabilities. The bulk of its funding, however, will fuel hires across engineering, design, product and marketing.
“We’re really excited to make the process of capturing this content even better,” Greene said. “The other thing that I am personally just as, if not more, excited about is turning these stories into the foundation of what we have been talking about as a living, breathing family history.”
In this era following the pandemic, people have been more encouraged to speed up and be productive rather than slow down and appreciate the individuals around them, Greene said. This lifestyle is compounded with an overwhelming abundance of smartphone camera-captured content, as well as social media that often tends to isolate people more than connect them, Greene added. Remento wants to help redefine what closeness and connection actually mean.
“So many of the families that we have spoken with are facing the realities of aging relatives, and children and grandchildren who see them less and don’t actually really know them,” Greene said. “My hope for Remento would be that, coming out of this pandemic, our platform can be a vehicle for technology to bring families together in a way that has always been core to the potential of the devices at our fingertips, but maybe hasn’t yet been fully realized.”
