More Than a Memory

Owner: Emilio Tomas Holguin and Lisa Merkel-Holguin

Bristow, VA, USA

“We want every pet parent who uses myFurever to feel less like memories are slipping into a scattered camera roll, and more like they have a real home for their pet’s story.”

About the Business

myFurever is a private, ad-free space where your pet’s story actually lives, not just scattered across a camera roll, but somewhere you can find it when it matters most. Most of what we love about our pets isn’t the big milestones; it’s the ordinary stuff: the Tuesday morning walk, the spot on the couch, the way they seem to know when we’ve had a long day. Photo apps store that. Social media performs it for an audience. myFurever is built to hold it, deepen it, and let you return to it.

Every pet gets a Living Memory Profile, a dedicated private space for photos, videos, and notes organized into a Life Timeline you can scroll back through for months or years. A Circle of Love lets you invite the people who love your pet too: family, sitters, grandparents, with PetGrams sending a gentle nudge whenever a new memory is added, so a grandparent can see the first walk or a college student can get proof their cat is fine. Furever Reflections offer guided prompts to help you slow down and put words to the bond you’re living every day. From there, Furever Creations turns your real memories into something worth keeping, like FureverTale, an AI-crafted short story built from your own uploads, and an Annual Virtual Keepsake marking the year.

We also give back through our Fur the Greater Good pledge, with up to 3% of our revenue each year going to rescues, shelters, and other organizations focused on the human-animal bond.

The Inspiration

We’re a mother-and-son duo, and myFurever exists because we were both, in our own ways, rescued by the same two dogs.

One of us spent over 30 years in child welfare and family systems work, guided by one truth: relationships are central to whole-person health and well-being. In 2020, two rescue dogs entered that world and made the lesson personal rather than professional: the steadiness of daily walks, the way presence alone could hold someone together during a hard season.

The other of us brings a background in international business, and between 2023 and 2025 lived across several continents, building a career far from home, and far from the two dogs who’d become family. What surprised him wasn’t the distance itself, but how much he missed the specific, ordinary connection with those animal companions — a bond that doesn’t translate to a video call, and that no app was built to hold onto in the meantime.

We started paying attention to what we were actually doing to keep that bond alive across distance, age, and time, and realized there wasn’t a tool for it. Photo apps store images. Social media asks you to perform the relationship for other people. Nothing was built to help you notice, reflect on, and keep the bond itself.

We didn’t start myFurever to build a business. We started it because the animals who quietly rescued both of us, in different ways, deserved more than a camera roll, and we suspected we weren’t the only ones who felt that way.

Creating Impact

At the center of everything we build is our mission: to celebrate the bond between people and their pets by creating a private, intentional space that supports connection, meaning, joy, and whole-person health. We want that mission to be felt, not just stated, in every feature, and in the impact we hope to have.

Decades of research show the human-animal bond lowers cortisol, supports cardiovascular health, strengthens child development, and eases agitation in older adults living with dementia: it’s structural, not sentimental. A separate, equally deep body of research shows that reflection itself, putting words to a meaningful relationship, reduces stress, improves sleep, and supports mental health and recovery. myFurever sits at the intersection of both: Furever Reflections is built directly on that science, because noticing the bond and writing it down changes what the bond can do for you. That’s connection and meaning made practical.

We want every pet parent who uses myFurever to feel less like memories are slipping into a scattered camera roll, and more like they have a real home for their pet’s story — one that holds them through change, aging, and loss, with the same joy and care we hope people find in the bond itself.

We also want the ripple to reach further out: through Fur the Greater Good, up to 3% of revenue supports our shelter and rescue partners and those organizations supporting the human-animal bond. Success for us isn’t just growth — it’s more bonds noticed, more grief met with gentleness, and more animals finding people who will love them the way ours have loved us.

myFurever sits at an unusual intersection: technology, grief and memory, and the human-animal bond, and that combination doesn’t fit neatly into typical startup or pet-industry coverage. We’re drawn to audiences who care about the “why” behind a business as much as the feature list, and who appreciate stories about reinvention and building something meaningful later in a career, alongside strangers who become collaborators along the way.

Being featured in Orbit Utopia would let us introduce myFurever to readers who think seriously about the kind of future worth building: for people, for technology, and for the relationships that quietly hold both together. We’d love the chance to share a founder story rooted in decades of human-services work, landing somewhere entirely unexpected: a home for the bond between people and their pets, built with the help of a cross-country network of people who believed in it before we could prove it was working.

The Journey

People assume a startup like this gets built by two founders in a room with a whiteboard. Ours got built at kitchen tables.

Long before there was an app, there were conversations: over dinner, on neighborhood walks, on phone calls that were supposed to be about something else and became stories about the animals who quietly run our households. College friends donated decades of business insight to help steer the ship. Friends with real expertise in the human-animal bond bravely reviewed our earliest, roughest ideas. Our Mom/Grandma, an artist, guided the color palette and visual identity. Neighbors became our first focus group without fully realizing that’s what they’d signed up for.

That same kindness followed us onto the road. As part of our soft launch, we drove across the country talking to strangers about their bond with their pets, a project we call Pet People Be Honest. Our very first evening, in Charleston, West Virginia, the first pet person we approached had a dog named Lucky, the same name as the dog Lisa grew up with, her late father Charlie’s faithful companion, gone for years now. It felt like more than a coincidence. Later stops brought watermelon on arrival at a friend’s home, sidewalk chalk math problems with kids, and advice from new mentors who had no reason to invest in us beyond simply wanting to help.

We didn’t expect a tech company to be carried this far by other people’s generosity. But that’s exactly what happened.

It wasn’t a download number. It was a woman we met on a trail to Skinny Dip Falls along the Blue Ridge Parkway, walking her pitbull. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d lost her other dog two days earlier, and her surviving dog was lost without his companion. We told her about myFurever, that she could still build a memory space for the dog she’d just lost. She went quiet for a moment, then said, “I think I was meant to meet you.”

We didn’t have a response. We just held it.

That’s the moment we’ve learned to recognize now: when myFurever stops being something we’re explaining and becomes something someone already needed, without us saying a word to prompt it. It happened again days later at a dog beach in Brooklyn, and again with a friend named Joyce, telling us about her cat Huey, our very first cat interview of the whole trip, proof that the bond we’re building for isn’t species-specific.

We set out thinking we were building for pet people. What we’re finding, one stranger at a time, is that we’re building for anyone who has ever loved something they couldn’t fully explain, and that the need was already there, waiting, before we ever showed up.

On December 31st, we found out our original app developer had a conflict of interest with his parent company and could no longer be part of the team, on the last day of the year, with the whole build in question. That’s the kind of moment that can quietly end a company.

We did the only thing we knew to do: we reached into our own network. A college roommate knew an entrepreneurial professor. The professor said, “I think I know someone who can help.” That introduction led us to the founder and director of a technical center whose team rebuilt our path forward with real rigor, and somehow, in the process, became like family rather than just a vendor relationship.

The harder, quieter challenge has been staying honest with ourselves along the way. Self-doubt creeps in on a project like this — what have we actually started? Where is this really going? Building something this emotionally serious, later in a career and early in a career, largely self-funded, inside an industry that often rewards speed and noise over reflection and care, has meant constantly defending slower, more intentional choices against a playbook that wasn’t built for something this tender. The people who’ve stuck with us, old friends, new collaborators, strangers who became both, are the only reason that defense has held.

Looking Ahead

We wish the media covered technology that slows people down instead of only celebrating what speeds them up. Coverage of new apps tends to focus on engagement and virality: how fast something can capture attention. We’d love to see more stories about products built around reflection, privacy, and emotional well-being: tools that ask “does this actually help someone feel more connected and at peace?” rather than “does this maximize time on screen?”

We’d also love to see more coverage of the human-animal bond as a legitimate part of whole-person health, not just cute-pet content but real acknowledgment that pets shape our emotional regulation, resilience, and sense of home in ways research increasingly supports. And we’d love more stories about the unglamorous, relational side of entrepreneurship: not the pitch deck and the funding round, but the college roommate who makes one phone call at exactly the right moment, and the strangers on a road trip who hand you the story you didn’t know you needed to hear.