A letter from Maren
Why I left product at Notion to build a household OS for families
From Portland, with one too many group chats.
Three years ago, on a Thursday in October, I sat at my kitchen table in Portland and counted. Six active group chats just to run one household. A shared calendar that nobody opened. A photo dump on my phone I hadn't scrolled back to since July. A daughter who had started asking, with the cheerful cruelty of a six-year-old, "Mama, why are you always on your phone?"
I had spent a decade building productivity software at Notion and Calm. I knew, technically, how to solve this. But the apps on the market were built for teams — optimized for sprint velocity, assignable, trackable, on-time. They treated my family the way a manager treats a sprint board.
What I wanted was quieter than that. A single place where the school reminder, the dentist photo, my mother's voice note about Sunday dinner, and the rule that phones go in a basket at 7 p.m. could all coexist without shouting at each other. Something that felt less like a tool and more like a room.
I called a friend who used to teach fourth grade. I called a therapist I trusted. I called two engineers I'd worked with at Calm who, like me, were tired of building software for "users" instead of people. In November 2021, the four of us rented a small room above a bagel shop on NW 13th and started writing.
The first version of Family Heartware was ugly. It only did one thing — it held a single shared bedtime rule across every device in the house, and it locked phones into a basket mode at the same minute every night. Our ten beta families told us, within a week, that the thing they wanted most was not more features. It was more quiet.
That has been our north star ever since. Every feature you see today — the Memory Graph, the Digital Sabbath, the cross-household photo timeline — started as a way to remove something. A group chat. A reminder. A small daily friction that, multiplied by five people, became a household headache.
If you've ever closed twelve apps at 9 p.m. and felt, underneath, that your family deserved something gentler — then this was built for you, and we are so glad you found your way here.
— Maren Kovacs, founder & CEO
Portland, Oregon · November 2024
The team, and their kids
Built by 38 people. 62% of them are parents.
We are not a productivity company retrofit for the family category. We were a family company from day one.
Eleven of us taught elementary or middle school before joining — they built the calm onboarding flow and the kid-mode interface. Four of us hold active licenses in family therapy; they review every word in the Memory Graph summaries before it ships. Three of our engineers are stay-at-home parents who came back to work part-time.
We have a strict hiring rule: every product decision that affects a child under thirteen has to be reviewed by someone who has put a child under thirteen to bed that week. It is, candidly, the rule that has saved us from our worst instincts.
Our headquarters is a converted craftsman house in Northwest Portland with a backyard, a leaky porch roof, and a meeting room we still call "the bagel room." When you email support, the person who answers is likely a parent whose kid will be at soccer practice in three hours.
- 11Former K–8 teachers on staff
- 4Licensed family therapists
- 62%Of the team are parents themselves
- 38People total, as of Q1 2025
Proof, quietly
What the team has shipped since 2021
We do not love the word "metrics." But these are the numbers that made it onto a poster in the bagel room.
312,000+ shared pickups, dropoffs, and school events coordinated through Family Heartware in 2024. End-to-end encryption audited by Cure53 in March 2024 — zero critical findings.
Backed by, and based in
Backed by people who build for the long run.
In February 2023 we closed a $14.2M Series A led by Obvious Ventures, with Lux Capital and Designer Fund participating. We chose investors who had themselves built things meant to outlive a quarterly earnings call.
We remain a small, deliberate team. We have turned down two acquisition offers to stay independent. The Open Heartware program — free for single-parent households and families earning under $35k a year — has onboarded 18,200+ qualifying families since launch.
Come see what your household feels like when it all lives in one place.
Try Family Heartware free for thirty days. No credit card, no "growth-hacked" onboarding email drip. Just the app, your household added in under seven minutes, and a quieter kitchen table.
— The Family Heartware team, 224 NW 13th Avenue, Suite 400, Portland, OR 97209