DGLegacy, an organization that’s designed a digital legacy planning and inheritance app, pitched immediately at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Startup Battlefield to element the way it’s serving to folks be sure that their family members inherit their property.
Based by husband-and-wife duo Ana Mineva and Peter Minev, DGLegacy permits customers to proactively inform their beneficiaries of their property and guarantee they’re conscious of their passwords and different data with a purpose to declare them. The thought behind the app is to reduce the prospect of an unclaimed asset.
In contrast to conventional asset safety instruments like trusts and wills, which may grow to be outdated quickly after their creation, DGLegacy helps you to hold a constantly up to date catalog of your property and ensures that beneficiaries will at all times have entry to it.
With DGLegacy, you may catalog your property and add related recordsdata to the respective asset. You possibly can then invite beneficiaries and trustees to make sure that they are going to be knowledgeable about their designated property.
The app options multi-layer encryption to make sure that all the data is saved securely.
“The most important thing about DGLegacy is that it allows you to not only catalog very securely and easily your digital assets, but also has a proprietary protocol for detecting a fatal event,” Peter informed TechCrunch. “Only when a fatal event is detected, then we trigger the digital inheritance.”
DGLegacy detects a deadly occasion by way of a number of totally different measures. In the event you join the app to your social networks, it displays your public posts to make sure you’re alive. When you’ve got given the app entry to biometric logins, DGLegacy displays your logins. If the app notices a pause in each of this stuff, DGLegacy sends you an electronic mail to verify in on you. If the corporate nonetheless doesn’t hear from you, it provides you with a name.
After a deadly occasion is confirmed, DGLegacy helps your beneficiaries within the means of figuring out, finding, and claiming property.
Ana and Peter consider that their app can assist the on a regular basis individual shield their property and guarantee their family members can entry them as soon as they cross away.
“Let’s be honest, if someone is very rich, they have private bankers,” Peter stated. “Our solution is for the middle class, for the regular people, and also people in war zones. We were super surprised when the war in Ukraine started and we had so many signings from Ukraine. We also have quite a lot of sign-ups from Gaza.”
Ana got here up with the thought for DGLegacy 15 years earlier than the startup’s official founding in January 2021.
She remembers being nervous earlier than each journey she and Peter took, as she was involved about what would occur to their youngsters if one thing horrible have been to happen on their travels.
“I invited my mother-in-law to show her all of the files and folders at home and said: ‘If something happens to us, I know you don’t have the money to take care of our kids, please know that we have this and that. So if something happens to us, you have our money to continue to keep the quality of life of our kids’,” Ana informed TechCrunch. “This was the very beginning of the ideation of DGLegacy.”
As she was doing this, she remembers considering to herself that there have to be a greater approach of doing so. Whereas folks with excessive internet worths have contingency plans to guard their property, Ana believed there needs to be an answer for middle-class households as properly.
After performing some analysis, Ana and Peter found that there are tens of billions of {dollars} of unclaimed money and advantages in the USA alone within the type of deserted financial institution accounts, inventory holdings, unclaimed life insurance coverage, and extra.
The duo additionally heard private tales from folks round them who had wanted an answer like DGLegacy. As an illustration, they knew somebody whose accomplice handed away in Dubai and acquired zero transparency about their accomplice’s property and checking account.
Quick-forward to 2017, Peter pitched Ana’s concept to a pal he met at a TechCrunch occasion in Berlin. Peter informed his pal, who labored at Fb, about Ana’s concept and requested if he had heard of anybody in Silicon Valley engaged on one thing to resolve the problem. After his pal informed him that he was searching for an answer himself and wasn’t conscious of anybody engaged on one, Peter and Ana determined that it was time to carry Ana’s concept to life.
DGLegacy operates on a freemium mannequin. Free customers can shield as much as three property and assign one beneficiary per asset, whereas Gold customers get limitless property and beneficiaries for $6.99 per 30 days or a one-time price of $199. For individuals who need extra safety, DGLegacy gives a Platinum plan with cyber breach monitoring of your property, the flexibility to handle property with your loved ones, devoted beneficiary assist and extra for $8.99 a month or a one-time price of $299.
The startup has been bootstrapped till now, and plans to lift its first VC spherical later this yr or early subsequent yr.
