About Penmora
This started with a friend. Jon was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in his late thirties. In 2018, his best friend (now one of the people behind Penmora) sat down with him to begin recording his life before the illness we knew was coming took more of him away.
The point was not just to capture facts. It was to catch the voice and rhythm of the person his family and friends knew: the way he spoke, the way he joked, and the way he made people laugh through his stories. His friend knew those things would become harder to reach, and once they were gone, no one would be able to bring them back.
In 2018, there was no simple system for doing this properly. There were cameras, microphones, transcription tools, note-taking apps, cloud drives and memoir services, but no simple way to sit with someone, record their stories properly, organise what they had said, and keep it all accessible without turning it into something else.
So the recordings were made the hard way. Question lists, video files, audio extracts, transcripts, folders, notes, timestamps. It worked, but only because someone close to Jon had the time, the technical confidence, and the reason to keep going.
When Jon died in 2025, those recordings became something different. They were no longer just interviews. They were the place where his family and friends could still hear him telling his own story in his own voice.
But even then, the problem had not really been solved. There was no good way to turn those recordings into something his family could easily search, revisit and use. The words were there. The voice was there. The memories were there. But they were still locked inside files, transcripts and workarounds.
That is the gap Penmora is being built to close.
Penmora is the product we wished had existed for Jon: a way to record a life story - a parent's, a partner's or your own - in the storyteller's own voice, in their own words, in their own time.
There are products that help people produce a finished memoir, and there is a place for that. But Penmora begins somewhere different. The archive comes first: the real recordings, the transcripts, the source material, the words as spoken. A book may come from that later, but it is not the whole point.
The point is to keep what someone actually said. Not a rewritten version of it. Not a more elegant version of it. Just what they said.
That is why we have written down the principles Penmora is built around and the commitments we make about your words. They are not decorative statements. They are the boundaries of the product.
Penmora is being built by a small team, working privately while we get the product right. We are not yet ready to be looked at in the way a launched product gets looked at, and we have decided to do the work properly before going public.
One of the people involved has a close family member who is currently the first person testing it. So the product is not being built in the abstract. It is being built by people who want it to work for someone they love.
If you would like to read further:
the six principles Penmora is built around. This explains what the AI may do, what it must never do, how the original recordings are protected, and where control sits.
the editorial commitments that follow from these principles. This explains what happens to your recordings, what can be edited, what stays untouched, and where the final say sits.
clear answers to the questions people are likely to ask before trusting Penmora with a life story.