DGLegacy, a company that’s designed a digital legacy planning and inheritance app, pitched today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Startup Battlefield to detail how it’s helping people ensure that their loved ones inherit their assets.
Founded by husband-and-wife duo Ana Mineva and Peter Minev, DGLegacy allows users to proactively inform their beneficiaries of their assets and ensure they are aware of their passwords and other information in order to claim them. The idea behind the app is to minimize the chance of an unclaimed asset.
Unlike traditional asset protection tools like trusts and wills, which can become outdated soon after their creation, DGLegacy lets you keep a continuously updated catalog of your assets and ensures that beneficiaries will always have access to it.
With DGLegacy, you can catalog your assets and upload relevant files to the respective asset. You can then invite beneficiaries and trustees to ensure that they will be informed about their designated assets.
The app features multi-layer encryption to ensure that all of the information is stored 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 told TechCrunch. “Only when a fatal event is detected, then we trigger the digital inheritance.”
DGLegacy detects a fatal event through several different measures. If you connect the app to your social networks, it monitors your public posts to ensure you’re alive. If you have given the app access to biometric logins, DGLegacy monitors your logins. If the app notices a pause in both of these things, DGLegacy sends you an email to check in on you. If the company still doesn’t hear from you, it will give you a call.
After a fatal event is confirmed, DGLegacy supports your beneficiaries in the process of identifying, locating, and claiming assets.
Ana and Peter believe that their app can help the everyday person protect their assets and ensure their loved ones can access them once they pass away.
“Let’s be honest, if someone is very rich, they have private bankers,” Peter said. “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 came up with the idea for DGLegacy 15 years before the startup’s official founding in January 2021.
Image Credits:DGLegacy
She recalls being nervous before every trip she and Peter took, as she was concerned about what would happen to their children if something terrible were to occur 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 told TechCrunch. “This was the very beginning of the ideation of DGLegacy.”
As she was doing this, she remembers thinking to herself that there must be a better way of doing so. While people with high net worths have contingency plans to protect their assets, Ana believed there should be a solution for middle-class families as well.
After doing some research, Ana and Peter discovered that there are tens of billions of dollars of unclaimed cash and benefits in the United States alone in the form of abandoned bank accounts, stock holdings, unclaimed life insurance, and more.
The duo also heard personal stories from people around them who had needed a solution like DGLegacy. For instance, they knew someone whose partner passed away in Dubai and received zero transparency about their partner’s assets and bank account.
Image Credits:DGLegacy
Fast-forward to 2017, Peter pitched Ana’s idea to a friend he met at a TechCrunch event in Berlin. Peter told his friend, who worked at Facebook, about Ana’s idea and asked if he had heard of anyone in Silicon Valley working on something to solve the issue. After his friend told him that he was looking for a solution himself and wasn’t aware of anyone working on one, Peter and Ana decided that it was time to bring Ana’s idea to life.
DGLegacy operates on a freemium model. Free users can protect up to three assets and assign one beneficiary per asset, while Gold users get unlimited assets and beneficiaries for $6.99 per month or a one-time fee of $199. For people who want additional protection, DGLegacy offers a Platinum plan with cyber breach monitoring of your assets, the ability to manage assets with your family, dedicated beneficiary support and more for $8.99 a month or a one-time fee of $299.
The startup has been bootstrapped until now, and plans to raise its first VC round later this year or early next year.