About Keepsake
We started with a question.
Keepsake exists because two researchers — a neuroscientist studying memory loss and an engineer studying memory error — arrived at the same question from opposite directions: what would it mean to give people back access to their own lives, with complete fidelity, on their own terms?
The problem neither of us could stop thinking about.
Maren Solberg spent six years watching Alzheimer's patients confabulate, or fill the gaps in damaged memory with plausible but false autobiographical content, with no awareness they were doing so. They weren't lying; in fact, they were doing exactly what memory is supposed to do, and the disease had only removed the safeguard that keeps the fabrications small. What Maren saw was that memory failure was an identity loss in addition to a cognitive loss.
Tobias Veith had spent three years building tamper-evident sensor systems for combat incident documentation, and was troubled by how consistently eyewitness accounts diverged from his sensors's logs. The divergence was the result of ordinary functioning of human memory under stress. What he saw was that the gap between experience and recollection was structural, universal, and in his context, consequential.
They met at a prosthetic cognition conference in Boston in 2002. Within six months they had incorporated.
"The record belongs to the person who lived it. Always."
In a single calendar year, Mnemix received acquisition approaches from two defense contractors and one major social media company. All three wanted to license the indexing architecture. None of the proposed applications concerned dementia care. Solberg read the proposals aloud at a company-wide meeting. The room was quiet for a long time. All three were declined.
Veith writes in his journal, published in part in a 2019 Wired profile: "We had built something that could be used to remember or to surveil, and the only thing separating those two uses was who held the keys. We needed to make sure it was always the person who lived the memory."
Twenty-four years.
- 2002
Mnemix Research Laboratory
Dr. Maren Solberg and Tobias Veith incorporate in a shared office above a sandwich shop on Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Solberg comes from MIT's Media Lab with six years of research into confabulation in Alzheimer's patients. Veith comes from the DARPA Human Performance program with three years of building tamper-evident incident documentation systems, and a quiet concern about how consistently eyewitness accounts diverge from sensor logs. They believe the gap between experience and recollection is a problem that could be solved.
- 2004
Series A and NIH funding
A $3.2M NIH grant and a Series A led by Benchmark Capital fund the first prototype: a subdermal sensor array paired with a low-power neural recording chip. The goal is clinical. At this stage, Keepsake is a medical device company and nothing else.
- 2006
First clinical trial, UPMC
Twelve early-stage Alzheimer's participants. IRB-approved, fully voluntary, twelve months. Participants shown recordings of their own recent days demonstrate measurably reduced distress in follow-up interviews. In several cases, the recordings surface small continuities (a familiar mug, a grandchild's name) that the participants had lost but immediately and emotionally recognized when shown to them. The team publishes.
- 2008
Three offers. Three declinations.
Two defense contractors and one major social media company approach Mnemix within the same calendar year. All three want to license the indexing architecture. None of the proposed applications concern dementia care. Solberg calls a company-wide meeting and reads the proposals aloud. The room is quiet for a long time. All three are declined.
- 2009
Renamed Keepsake
The company rewrites its charter and renames itself. Solberg writes on a whiteboard in red marker: The record belongs to the person who lived it. Always. The whiteboard still hangs in the Cambridge lobby.
- 2014
Public Benefit Corporation
Ahead of the first commercial product launch, the board votes to convert to a PBC. The stated public benefit: advancing human psychological wellbeing by expanding individuals' sovereign access to their own lived experience. "We needed the structure to match the promise," Solberg tells The Atlantic. "If we're ever under pressure to do something we shouldn't, I want the law to be on the side of what we said we'd do."
- 2015
Keepsake One
The first consumer neural implant. Surgical, outpatient, $38,000 at launch. Distribution deliberately limited to forty thousand people in the first year while safety data builds. Forty thousand people request access in the first month.
- 2016
Independent Oversight Board established
In response to growing public scrutiny of the lifelogging category (and to several data breaches at smaller competitors) the board is formed with genuine authority: it can compel internal audits, publish findings without company approval, and recommend product holds. It is not an advisory board.
- 2018
Keepsake Lite
A non-invasive alternative for users who cannot or do not want implant surgery, a slim behind-the-ear sensor paired with a wrist array was introduced. Subscription-based. Within eighteen months, Lite users represent the majority of active Keepsake accounts.
- 2019
ISO/IEC 27001 certification
Third-party certified. Zero-knowledge architecture independently audited. One critical finding, a side-channel risk in key derivation during firmware updates, was remediated within ninety days and disclosed proactively in the annual transparency report.
- 2021
Keepsake Three
Fully wireless. 40nm process. Six-month passive battery life. FDA Class II cleared. Outpatient procedure, thirty minutes under local anesthesia. Price: $4,200 with financing. Adoption accelerates sharply.
- 2022
Veith chairs the Oversight Board
Tobias Veith transitions from CTO to chair of the Independent Oversight Board, replaced as CTO by Dr. Priya Anand, formerly of DeepMind's interpretability team. The move is widely read as a structural statement in that the person most worried is now the person whose job it is to watch.
- 2026
350 million active implants worldwide
One of the most widely deployed medical devices in human history. Three acquisition offers declined, the most recent at a reported $140 billion. The company's response, consisting of four paragraphs, ends: "We are not a feature." Maren Solberg remains CEO.
Two people. One question.
Solberg completed her PhD in computational neuroscience at MIT in 2000, focusing on memory consolidation and the neural correlates of autobiographical recall. Her postdoctoral work in the Media Lab — on prosthetic memory systems for patients with early-stage Alzheimer's — became the clinical foundation of Keepsake's architecture.
She has declined to characterise what Keepsake has built as "technology." In a 2022 commencement address at MIT: "We built an argument in code. The argument is that your life is worth keeping exactly as it happened. Everything else follows from that."
She remains CEO.
Veith studied computer science at The University of Utah and spent his early career as a contractor building sensor and documentation systems for DARPA's Human Performance program. His work was technically precise, yet privately troubling, in that while the systems he built were accurate the accounts people gave of the events those systems recorded were frequently not.
He served as Keepsake's CTO from founding through 2022, when he transitioned to chair the Independent Oversight Board (the governing body with authority to compel audits and publish findings without the company's approval). He was asked in an interview why he gave up the CTO role to run the oversight function.
"The most important thing I can do now is watch."
Our structure.
In 2014, ahead of the launch of Keepsake One, the board voted to convert to a Public Benefit Corporation. A PBC is a legal structure that requires the company to balance the interests of its shareholders against a stated public benefit, and to do so even when those interests are in conflict.
Keepsake's stated public benefit is: advancing human psychological wellbeing by expanding individuals' sovereign access to their own lived experience.
This is both a mission statement and a legal obligation that persists through acquisition, leadership change, and financial pressure. It cannot be removed without shareholder approval and public notice.
Keepsake has received three acquisition offers since 2020. All three were declined. The PBC structure was part of every conversation.
Pursue the stated public benefit even when doing so is less profitable than the alternative. Turn down acquisition offers. Decline product partnerships. Invest in oversight infrastructure at the expense of near-term returns.
Remove the benefit commitment without shareholder vote and public disclosure. Operate in a way that is systematically contrary to the stated benefit without legal exposure. Use the PBC status as a marketing claim without being subject to scrutiny on whether it is true.
Keepsake has been a Public Benefit Corporation for twelve years. The benefit commitment predates 300 million of our current 350 million active implants.
Genuine oversight.
The Board was established in 2016 with three powers that distinguish it from a standard advisory body: it can compel internal audits, publish its findings without the company's editorial approval, and recommend formal product holds. Its annual reports are public and unredacted.
Meet the oversight board →Transitioned from CTO to chair the Board in 2022. His presence is the Board's founding structural argument.
Twenty years of research into cognitive enhancement technology and the ethics of neural interfaces.
Former director of the ACLU Technology Project. Litigated three landmark cases on digital memory and privacy.
Specialises in the neurobiology of autobiographical memory. Has testified before Congress on memory technology twice.
Former senior attorney at the FTC. Led enforcement actions against two major data brokers before joining the Board.
Represents the organisation whose members were Keepsake's first clinical trial participants.
The Board reviews Keepsake's data practices, security posture, product decisions, and use of the benefit commitment on a continuous basis.
It can compel an audit at any time, publish findings without company approval, and formally recommend that a product or feature be held pending review.
Annual reports are published in full, and are not reviewed or edited by Keepsake before publication. The 2021 report identified and disclosed a security finding before Keepsake's own audit cycle.
Your walkthrough is personal to you.
See what Keepsake looks like in practice through what the archive surfaces, how the timeline feels, and what Keepsake remembers about a day you thought you knew.