Investors

Everyone has a family, and every family has a history. Much of it lives in the memories of the oldest relatives, in boxes of photographs and papers, and in a tree that one person keeps for everyone else. When the oldest generation dies, what they remembered goes with them, and the archive stays with whoever built it.

People already spend money and years of work on genealogy services, which shows how strong the need is. Those services grew up around searching historical records; Saga starts from what a family holds itself.

Family history is also wider than the records most genealogy software was built for. Chinese families have kept written genealogies, jiapu, for centuries, and Korean clans keep their jokbo. In the Gulf, a family’s lineage, its nasab, lives in Arabic name chains, and its dates are often kept in two calendars. These traditions, and the families who carry them abroad, have had few tools made for them.

In June 2025, Apple opened the on-device model behind Apple Intelligence to every app: it runs on the iPhone itself, works when the phone is offline, and was built with privacy. That makes a later phase of Saga possible, in which a family asks questions of its own history with Apple Intelligence and each answer is drawn only from the saga’s own sources. From launch, Saga will transcribe stories and sort documents on the iPhone itself. Populations are aging, and the generation that holds the oldest family memories is larger than it has ever been. What people add to Saga will live on their iPhone and in their iCloud, and only they will decide who sees it.

Saga is designed as one platform for the whole family, launched in phases. It starts on iPhone with one person, the family’s keeper, who brings in the tree they already have, builds it relative by relative, or records the stories of a parent or grandparent. Families will find Saga through family: at launch, the keeper will be able to send a relative a copy of the family’s saga to read in Saga, and that relative can start a saga of their own.

Family accounts come next. Relatives will join the family’s saga, add what they know, and pass it on to the next generation. In the long run, we plan a platform where family sagas connect through the people they share: a marriage joins two families, and each family’s saga stays its own.

• A genealogy platform. Keepsake apps gather one relative’s stories over a year and print them as a book. Saga will hold the whole family across generations, with remarriages, adoptions, and unknown parents as they were.
• Stories in their place. A recorded story will belong to the person who told it and to the moment it’s about, on the family’s timeline beside the documents of that time.
• A file the family keeps. A family’s saga will stay with the family, and it can leave with them as a file.
• Traditions side by side. Regional apps each serve one tradition. From its first version, Saga will keep names in their own script and order, dates as they were written, and places that changed their names, so a Korean clan line, an Arabic name chain, and a Russian patronymic will sit in the same kind of saga.
• Evidence kept. Each fact will keep its source. When two sources disagree, Saga will keep both, and a lead that turned out wrong will stay with its reason, so nobody repeats the research.
• Real voices only. A relative’s story will play in their own recorded voice, and Saga will never make up a voice or a digital twin to answer for them.

Alexander Toporov, Saga’s founder, is a historian and a designer. Saga started with his father’s genealogy: 8,000 people and 1,800 families across 500 years, traced over twenty years. When his father died, the archive came to Alexander and stayed in his iCloud for years, where the rest of the family could neither read it nor add to it.

Saga is his answer: one place where a family’s research and its stories will live together, in a form relatives can open in Saga. His aim reaches past one family: as sagas connect, an archive like his father’s will become a chapter in the history of humankind, told family by family. He is building and launching the first version himself.

Read the founder’s note

It has the market, the business model, and the roadmap in full. Write to us, and we’ll send it.