Gorham startup seeks to preserve family memories through digital archive system

Provided by Voice Kite A prototype of the graphical user interface for Voice Kite's smartphone app.

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By Dylan Martin

It was in January 2012 when Pamela Castrucci, an assistant vice president and managing counsel at Unum, learned that her friend’s 7-year-old son lost his last chance of receiving medical help from a mysterious ailment that would take his life a year later.

Knowing the pain of losing her own twin infant boys, Castrucci knew she had to do something to help the family and their son Kyle St. Clair. The boy, who had entered hospice care and later passed away at 8 years old in January 2013, had inspired thousands of people through a website and Facebook page maintained by his family that chronicled his life and his endurance through a terminal illness that required more than 50 surgeries.

Three weeks later in 2012, an idea occurred to Castrucci in the middle of a sleepless night: create a modern way to capture and preserve Kyle’s essence through audio, videos and photos so that his life can be shared with others for generations to come.

“I woke up and thought this is what they need because I had to find a way to help them ,” Castrucci told Mainebiz over the phone last week. “The urgency, I could taste it.”

Despite her best efforts — which involved a whirlwind of learning how to start a business through several programs, along with finding the necessary funding for start-up costs — Castrucci’s idea wasn’t ready in time for Kyle.

That idea has since evolved into Voice Kite, a Gorham-based company led by Castrucci; Kate St. Clair, Kyle’s mother and a Scarborough town council member; Janna Smith, an employee at Portland-based Power Pay; and Kirsten Schultz Marjerison, who runs her own design firm.

Castrucci said the company aims to revolutionize the way people pass down their legacy with a cloud-based digital archival system that can preserve audio, photos and video and other kinds of content through tablet and smartphone apps.

“We tried to get this done in time to record Kyle and it’s that bitterness that drives us,” said Castrucci, CEO and founder of Voice Kite. “I wish I had this when my mother was sick.”

Voice Kite recently raised its second round of funding from the Maine Technology Institute, in the form of a $15,688 seed grant, and it’s now seeking to fund the second phase of development with $10,000 from a Kickstarter campaign that launched last week. That money, Castrucci said, will help Voice Kite apply for a development loan through MTI.

While online services like Facebook already offer some methods of storing personal content online, Castrucci said Voice Kite seeks to separate itself by focusing squarely on providing an intuitive, secure and permanent method of preserving online memories.

“While it’s a business, our whole reason for existing is we want to help people and we want to revolutionize the way they pass down their legacy,” she said. “We want people generations from now to hear their voices and know why they mattered.”