Eluum is taking aim at a problem created by the explosion of digital life: We chronicle our lives everywhere, but a single home for our most meaningful memories is hard to come by.
The Seattle startup’s new app brings together photos, videos, social posts, locations and other personal moments from across the digital landscape, using AI to help organize them into an evolving record of a person’s life, a feature it calls MyLifeStory.
The bootstrapped company, founded by former Microsoft and Avalara manager Bilkay Rose, former Microsoft software engineer Dale Rector and former investor relations exec Jennifer Gianola, sees an opportunity to create what it calls a user-controlled “memory layer” for social media.
The idea grew out of Rose’s own struggle to piece together years of family memories across a variety of platforms and devices. The app is available for iOS, Android and the web.
We caught up with Rose, who is part of the CoMotion entrepreneurial community at the University of Washington, for the latest installment of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.
In 50 words or less, give us your elevator pitch:
Eluum is building the future of social around people’s stories. MyLifeStory brings scattered photos, videos, social posts, places, and personal context into one evolving life story, helped by Lumi, our artificial intelligence memory companion, and controlled by the person whose life it represents.
What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Each of us creates thousands of digital artifacts, but they are scattered across camera rolls, social platforms, devices, and feeds. Nothing brings them together as the evolving story of a person’s life. Every person I know deals with this issue, but it seems too big to solve for most. We believe technology has finally reached the point where MyLifeStory can become real: a living story built across time, not another temporary feed built around advertising and engagement.
What surprised you after talking to customers?
People do not need another place to post. They want help making sense of what they have already created, and continue to create on a daily basis. What surprised us was how consistently people described feeling overwhelmed by their digital lives. They have the photos and posts, but the meaning — the people they actually create memories with, places they visit, experiences, and stories connecting everything — is being lost every single day.
How has artificial intelligence changed the way you build your company?
Artificial intelligence gives a small, determined team extraordinary leverage. It allows Dale, our CTO, and our broader team to build, design, test, and learn faster without requiring a massive organization or budget. More importantly, it makes our product possible.
Lumi helps users organize disconnected moments, add context, and gradually shape them into meaningful life stories. Artificial intelligence is the helper; the person remains the author. We have a bold vision for what technology can do for the average person, and we believe the first problem to solve is our memories. The most important thing in everyone’s lives is their journey through life.
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What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
People sometimes assume Eluum is another social network or photo-storage application. It is neither. Eluum is building a human memory layer for social.
Our integrated social tools help people manage and share content, but MyLifeStory is the destination: a private, user-controlled story of their life that becomes more valuable over time. As a female founder, my mission is to build a company that can solve real problems. Our mission is to solve problems and make our users’ lives better.
What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?
Our founding team had to decide whether Eluum was primarily a life-memory platform or an integrated social platform. We see two enormous problems: social media needs a new, human-centered model decoupling our social lives from ad and algorithmic platforms, and people need a way to preserve their fragmented digital lives.
We ultimately realized these ideas are connected. Integrated social is how moments flow into Eluum; MyLifeStory is what gives those moments lasting meaning. Balancing that product vision with limited resources — while continually asking what users truly want, need, and would think is genuinely exciting — remains our hardest discipline.
What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?
Do not confuse limited resources with an inability to make progress. A determined small team, the right technology, and a meaningful problem can accomplish far more than most people expect.
Listen closely to users, but maintain enough conviction to build what they cannot yet describe. Think big and don’t get easily discouraged early on. Prove your idea.
We’ll know our company has made it when…
I cannot imagine declaring that we have “made it.” That would be naive because trust must continually be earned. Success would mean Eluum becomes a trusted brand people rely on to build and preserve their life stories, knowing our products were designed to work for them, protect what matters, and become more meaningful with time.
