GoodTrust raises $2.3 million for digital legacy platform

Digital legacy management company GoodTrust takes care of your digital assets after you die, and now the company has raised $ 2.3 million in funding.

Rikard Steiber founded the company after he discovered how difficult it can be to manage someone’s estate after friends died during the pandemic. He empathized with family members’ struggle to complete tasks like closing social media accounts, securing photos, and dealing with financial services accounts.

With GoodTrust, you can set up an account and it will take care of your digital affairs after you die. That might sound ghoulish to some, but we’re all going to die, and we don’t want to leave our loved ones with a big mess. GoodTrust’s platform protects your memories and
digital assets including accounts, photos, social media, financial data, and documents.

Seed-round investors include Bling Capital, Synetro Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, and Silicon Valley angel investors including Nikesh Arora, Bobby Lo, and Christian Wiklund. Other angel investors include current and former Google executives including Scott Levitan, Arjan
Dijk, Tony Fagan, Jori Pearsall, and Gopi Kallayil.

In an email to VentureBeat, Steiber said the company partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Veterans Day, offering all veterans free usage of the GoodTrust Premium Plan and a copy of the company’s book, Digital Legacy.

The company has two services. The $ 40 account helps families who lost some take care of their digital account (e.g. delete LinkedIn, memorialize Facebook, or extract Google Photos). The company also secures a digital legacy (your accounts, social media, documents, last goodbyes, etc.) via a freemium subscription service at $ 70 a year.

“The most popular thing now is that people realize their digital assets and priceless memories will be lost if they do not take action,” Steiber said. “As a result, we have good traction with people adding their digital assets i.e. everything from their phone pin code, online accounts (financial, email, photos), and important documents (their will, life insurance, contracts) and share this with their partner/family members. In the GoodTrust service, digital assets can be shared either right now, or you set that they can be shared only after you passed away. GoodTrust is like life insurance for your digital assets and memories.”

Palo Alto, California-based GoodTrust is dedicated to protecting the memory of loved ones and securing their assets after death. There are other services that cover some of the same ground, but GoodTrust tries to handle all of the legal, financial, and emotional legacies heirs typically have to deal with.

The service can lock down more than 100 sites. In cases that cost more, it can even get court orders to gain access to accounts that require such measures. The company can also handle Facebook memorialization for first responders and their families at no cost.

In a 2020 survey, GoodTrust found 90% of U.S. adults do not know what happens to their digital assets (emails, photos, social media, online banking, sites/passwords) when they pass away, and 84% said they would use a secure online service to transition those assets when they die.

Above: GoodTrust secures your digital assets after death.

Image Credit: GoodTrust

Around the world, 150,000 people die every day. While each tragedy affects loved ones on a personal level, it also means the number of deceased people on the internet is growing fast.

You can designate and share access with loved ones and other trusted third parties to organize your digital afterlife. In addition to planning for the future, GoodTrust also helps families who lost someone take care of the deceased person’s digital assets by memorializing social media pages (e.g. Facebook), secure photos (e.g. Google Photos), stop subscriptions (e.g. Netflix), and close down accounts (e.g. LinkedIn).

GoodTrust also recently launched new features including Last Goodbyes to create a time capsule with an email, social post, or video that can be shared after someone passes away.

Beyond the task of tracking down sites you never knew existed, shuttering an account on someone else’s behalf is made more complicated by legal requirements that vary from site to site. Retrieving personal photos from a loved one’s account on Google, Apple, or Facebook requires expert legal knowledge and a court order. Those companies aren’t trying to make a survivor’s life hard. Just think of the consequences if they turned over an account to someone claiming to be a survivor when the “deceased” person was still alive.

Even if the family is aware of their loved one’s online accounts, most families are overwhelmed by the process. But when these accounts lie idle, their loved one’s information is at risk of being lost forever or even hacked.