A trio of Beaverton entrepreneurs want to give more people the ability to record family history or special moments in a professional manner and creating immersive audio experiences.
They are starting with weddings.
Jake Estes, Ryan Huff and Noah Cawley are building Ourtifact (sounds like artifact) to help preserve stories.
“I come from a family of storytellers. My dad is a writer,” said Estes, who is CEO. “When the pandemic started I wanted to get him an opportunity to create an audiobook to listen to him tell his stories. He’s a war veteran and his stories carry a lot of emotion. I wanted to capture those in a way that I can share with my daughter when she gets older. There is something about voice that is very powerful.”
It turns out booking studio time is both expensive and difficult to coordinate. But, Estes was able to do it, and the result was an audio file that was special.
“This is wonderful. I can hear his voice and hear the emotion behind it. There are a lot of stories we want to keep and preserve and folks may not have the platform of a writer or the ability to get into a studio,” he said.
Estes connected with a friend from his days working at Airbnb, Huff, and they started work on this idea. Eventually, Estes brought in Cawley, a friend from his time at corporate audio storytelling startup Storyboard, and the product started to solidify.
For now the process is still manual and involves a contract audio editor. But the team is working on AI tools to streamline the process and scale.
"(There are) exciting tools coming for speech to text and text to speech. And with (large language models) in general there is an opportunity to fine tune AI around storytelling and arrangement of the audio itself," said Cawley. "That is what we are working on."
Their first market is the wedding industry, where people already look for ways to preserve moments and memories.
The startup has completed work for 11 couples and has 35 in the pipeline. The company has a virtual studio it uses to record the couple talking about their story. Other audio from family members or friends can be added as well as music. The result is an audio piece that can be shared on a wedding website or during the reception.
“It’s customizable. You can continue to add tracks and audio layers, so if you want to get people to talk about the couple, or take audio from the wedding and weave that in and hear speeches or music,” said Huff. “It’s like a ‘This American Life’ quality podcast.”
Technology or product: Personalized and immersive audio keepsakes created through professionally recorded oral narratives that are edited, remastered and integrated with music and sounds all managed by professional audio engineers and powered by AI.
How it makes money: Ourtifact has found immediate validation in the wedding space by offering couples a new way to tell, share and preserve their story. The company charges clients on various story packages. Price and package is decided by the project size, number if interview subjects and the number of audio layers.
Size of market: The company’s initial focus is the wedding industry. There were 2.5 million weddings in the U.S. in 2022. In 2020, the global market for wedding services generated $160.5 billion, according to Allied Market Research. That number is projected to reach $414.2 billion by 2030. The average U.S. wedding costs $30,000 and the team sees Ourtifact as another way to preserve the moment.
Competition: There is traditional wedding photography and videography as well as audio guest books.
Competitive advantage: Photography and videography are common for weddings, but the team sees Ourtifact’s immersive audio product as a key differentiator. People can tell their own stories in their own voice and the professional editing captures the emotion in a distinct way to preserve the memory. The company is also developing its own AI tools to increase the customization while still scaling this ability for audio storytelling.
Business it could disrupt: Traditional wedding favors, greeting cards and gifts, audio documentation services, podcasting and audio content, family history services.
Managers and their backgrounds: Jake Estes, previously at Storyboard and Airbnb; Ryan Huff, previously at Airbnb and Vacasa; and Noah Cawley, previously at Storyboard and Nike.
Investors: none
Capital Sought: To be determined. The company soft launched in fall of 2023 and is working through an initial pipeline of 35 couples.
Ideal exit: To be determined. The company is starting with the wedding industry and wants to build dominant product in that space. They have also seen interest from business customers looking for products to help employee onboarding or for corporate events.
Closer look
Company: Ourtifact
Headquarters: Beaverton
Founded: 2023
CEO: Jake Estes
Employees: three co-founders
Web: www.ourtifact.com
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