Trusty Estate, an AI-powered estate planning startup founded by Randy Frisch, has raised $1 million in a pre‑seed round. The funding was co-led by Relay Ventures and Graphite Ventures, with backing from Mistral Venture Partners and strategic angel investors. This round marks a pivotal step as Trusty expands its product and forms deeper partnerships with financial and advisory networks across North America.

Building Legacy Planning That Fits Modern Lives

Trusty Estate reimagines estate planning from the ground up. The platform helps users create legally valid wills, designate executors, assign digital assets, and prepare a modern Letter of Wishes - all through a guided, conversational interface powered by AI. Designed for evolving life moments - marriage, new heirs, changing assets - the platform enables users to edit plans in minutes, with no need for legalese or professional fees.

Founded in 2024 and rebranded to Trusty in 2025, the company was born out of Frisch’s personal experience navigating his grandmother’s estate - where legal clarity was missing and family anxieties were amplified. Under his leadership, Trusty introduced tools like image recognition asset logs and a conversational AI assistant named “Max” to translate legal complexities into emotional clarity and practical guidance.

Real Innovation Hides in Quiet Spaces

Trusty Estate didn’t seek attention by tackling trending fintech problems. It attacked a universal yet silent pain: the confusion, emotional friction, and missed legacies created when wills don’t tell the full story. By helping families document heirlooms, record intentions, store documents, and assign digital assets, the startup bridges the gap between legal forms and personal meaning.

Here's the critical lesson: the most defensible products are often ones people don’t talk about - but depend on. Trusty didn’t rush to build flashy features; it built infrastructure that becomes indispensable once people try it. That’s why retention isn’t driven by gimmicks, but by a deeply felt relief: “My family knows what I want.” For founder teams, especially in deeptech or complex domains, embedding value in these quiet but urgent workflows is where lasting impact starts.

Crucially, Trusty is designed for embedded distribution. Instead of going direct-to-consumer alone, the company is piloting partnerships with banks, wealth advisors, and employee benefit platforms. Estate planning isn’t a standalone product - it’s an add-on to trusted financial journeys. When you build your go‑to‑market strategy around existing relationships and trust channels, not only does CAC go down - it becomes invisible, because it feels like a natural extension of other high-trust products.

Supporting Families in a Digital Era

Trusty’s features extend beyond wills. The platform helps users digitize tangible items via photo uploads, pair them with descriptive notes and personal video messages, and assign beneficiaries in ways that traditional documents never capture. Executor tools and encrypted legacy vaults ensure that intentions remain accessible and actionable during emotionally vulnerable moments.

The AI assistant Max helps decode legal language - summarizing wills or answering questions like “Who gets the watch?” - making planning more transparent for both creators and heirs. These functionalities reduce friction, build emotional trust, and make Trusty a tool that families choose to revisit - not avoid.

Founder-Led Mission with Deep Commitment

Randy Frisch launched the company after successfully co‑founding Uberflip, bringing a product-first and go-to-market mindset to estate tech. Frisch often recounts how his grandmother’s legacy planning revealed cracks in what seemed like prepared estates - and how those gaps caused unnecessary stress despite good intentions. With Trusty, he aims to fill that emotional void with structure, meaning, and peace of mind.

Where the $1M Pre‑Seed Will Go

With new capital, Trusty Estate plans to invest in its product roadmap - particularly enhancing AI for asset detection, document summarization, and estate advisor collaboration workflows. Engineering and design teams will grow, while go‑to‑market efforts will focus on partnerships with fintech firms, HR platforms, and insurance providers who already serve financially trusted ecosystems.

The company is also launching "Trusty for Advisors," a version tailored for financial planners and legal professionals who serve high-net-worth families. This workstream aims to embed Trusty into advisory workflows, giving advisors a visibility and client engagement layer beyond traditional wills.

Why Investors Backed the Vision

Relay Ventures and Graphite Ventures see Trusty as a category-defining company in a moment of generational change. With trillions expected to transfer over the next few decades, investors are betting on tools that bring clarity and emotional intelligence to wealth transitions - areas traditional wills neglect.

The investor endorsement goes deeper than capital - it validated Trusty’s approach to marrying technology with empathy and legal rigor. Graphite’s GP Aaron Bast described the platform as the “connective tissue” families and advisors have long lacked, while Relay’s Alex Baker affirmed Randy Frisch’s ability to redefine an ignored vertical with vision and operational discipline.