- Digital legacy company GoodTrust announced it has closed $2.3 million in a seed round of funding. These are the details.
Digital legacy company GoodTrust announced it has closed $2.3 million in a seed round of funding led by Bling Capital, Synetro Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, and Silicon Valley angel investors including Nikesh Arora, Bobby Lo, and Christian Wiklund. And other angel investors feature several current and former Google executives including Scott Levitan, Arjan Dijk, Tony Fagan, Jori Pearsall, and Gopi Kallayil.
Launched by former Google executive Rikard Steiber, GoodTrust provides a secure digital-legacy platform for online accounts, social media, financial accounts, photos, documents, and more. And GoodTrust provides a straightforward and simple way of managing all these assets as well as designating and sharing access with loved ones and other trusted third parties to organize, secure, protect and preserve anyone’s “digital afterlife.”
Along with 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 (example: Facebook), secure photos (example: Google Photos), stop subscriptions (example: Netflix), and close down accounts (example: LinkedIn). And 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.
The founding team of GoodTrust includes CEO Rikard Steiber, serial entrepreneur CTO Markus Thorsveldt, CFO Christian Lagerling and other ex-Googlers like Scott Levitan and Daniel Sieberg. Steiber and Sieberg had co-authored a book called Digital Legacy: Take Control of Your Online Afterlife, which was released in December 2020 (Stonesong).
KEY QUOTES:
“We believe that everyone has the right to control their digital afterlife and that your priceless memories and assets do not get lost forever after you pass away. We have an exciting product roadmap ahead to help preserve anyone’s human story in the digital world.”
— Rikard Steiber, CEO of GoodTrust
“The importance of anyone’s digital legacy has never been more relevant as our real and online worlds continue to intertwine. I believe the team at GoodTrust is uniquely positioned to solve this global challenge with its innovative approach to protecting those priceless memories, stories, and digital assets.”
— Ben Ling, Founding General Partner at Bling Capital
“The events of this past year have reminded us all how important it is to protect our family and our legacy. GoodTrust provides a critical service to help everyone protect our personal digital footprint at a time where we all live our lives online more than ever before. We are excited to partner with Rikard and team to realize their boldest ambitions to help consumers at scale.”
— Margo Georgiadis, Managing Partner at Synetro Ventures and former CEO and President of Ancestry
“People create a will to ensure the division of their physical assets among heirs takes place according to their wishes and GoodTrust enables the same control over digital assets, memories, and reputation. Over time, using GoodTrust should prove to be equally as important as the traditional means.”
— Mike Kwatinetz, a founding General Partner at Azure Capital
