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 individuals be certain that their family members inherit their belongings.
Based by husband-and-wife duo Ana Mineva and Peter Minev, DGLegacy permits customers to proactively inform their beneficiaries of their belongings and guarantee they’re conscious of their passwords and different info to be able to declare them. The thought behind the app is to attenuate the possibility of an unclaimed asset.
In contrast to conventional asset safety instruments like trusts and wills, which might change into outdated quickly after their creation, DGLegacy helps you to maintain a repeatedly up to date catalog of your belongings and ensures that beneficiaries will all the time have entry to it.
With DGLegacy, you’ll be able to catalog your belongings and add related information to the respective asset. You’ll be able to then invite beneficiaries and trustees to make sure that they are going to be knowledgeable about their designated belongings.
The app options multi-layer encryption to make sure that all the info 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 instructed TechCrunch. “Only when a fatal event is detected, then we trigger the digital inheritance.”
DGLegacy detects a deadly occasion via a number of completely different measures. For those who join the app to your social networks, it displays your public posts to make sure you’re alive. You probably have given the app entry to biometric logins, DGLegacy displays your logins. If the app notices a pause in each of these items, DGLegacy sends you an e mail to examine in on you. If the corporate nonetheless doesn’t hear from you, it gives you a name.
After a deadly occasion is confirmed, DGLegacy helps your beneficiaries within the technique of figuring out, finding, and claiming belongings.
Ana and Peter imagine that their app may help the on a regular basis individual defend their belongings and guarantee their family members can entry them as soon as they go away.
“Let’s be honest, if someone is very rich, they have private bankers,” Peter mentioned. “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 had 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 instructed TechCrunch. “This was the very beginning of the ideation of DGLegacy.”
As she was doing this, she remembers pondering to herself that there should be a greater approach of doing so. Whereas individuals with excessive web worths have contingency plans to guard their belongings, Ana believed there ought to be an answer for middle-class households as nicely.
After doing a little 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 individuals 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 belongings and checking account.
Quick-forward to 2017, Peter pitched Ana’s concept to a buddy he met at a TechCrunch occasion in Berlin. Peter instructed his buddy, 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 difficulty. After his buddy instructed 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 deliver Ana’s concept to life.
DGLegacy operates on a freemium mannequin. Free customers can defend as much as three belongings and assign one beneficiary per asset, whereas Gold customers get limitless belongings and beneficiaries for $6.99 monthly or a one-time price of $199. For individuals who need extra safety, DGLegacy affords a Platinum plan with cyber breach monitoring of your belongings, the flexibility to handle belongings 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 12 months or early subsequent 12 months.
