Entrepreneur Miles Spencer's Reflekta: An AI Startup Redefining Memories and Lasting Connections

In the latest Experienced Voices episode, serial entrepreneur Miles Spencer takes us inside the making of Reflekta—an innovation racing to be first to market with a bold new use of AI: preserving the voices and stories of loved ones across generations.

Miles shares why urgency matters in pioneering innovation, how the power of word-of-mouth can impact adoption, and the delicate process of finding true product-market fit when you’re building something entirely new.

We also dive into his belief that in entrepreneurship, the best idea wins—but only if you know how to execute fast, listen to your early users, and scale with purpose.

Tune in for a conversation about visionary AI that is enabling people to stay connected to loved ones across time. 

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I am Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series Experience Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

The power of artificial intelligence is often framed in terms of jobs, productivity or medical breakthroughs. But serial entrepreneur, miles Spencer brings a profoundly human twist. What if AI could capture the memories of departed loved ones, creating digital characters that speak in their voice, share their stories, and provide comfort across generations?

In this episode of Experienced Voices, miles Reveals how this vision became Reflekta. A startup built with a team of accomplished co-founders who turned his idea into reality. Together they are pioneering technology that preserves the image and likeness of beloved family and friends, creating connections that overcome the passing of time.

Welcome to Experienced Voices, miles.

 it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm very excited to hear about Reflekta your new venture. 

Miles Spencer: Jeanne, thank you for having me. 

Jeanne Gray: So let's start with sharing with the listeners, the Soul Tech platform and in your own words what I think is a great innovation that really touches people's hearts.

Miles Spencer: Well, thank you Jeanne. SoTech was a term we came up with just recently because what our experience has been is that AI and the dialogue around it has been about getting rid of jobs, cutting margin, eliminating paperwork, et cetera. And so is all these little cut, cut cuts at humanity. And frankly people are getting nervous about it.

And we were on the outside looking in. didn't have an AI product or an ai service, but what we did have was a tremendous connection with our families, our legacy, our desire to preserve that over the generations. And five months ago, myself and my co-founder, Adam Drake, just looked at each other and said all these things we've always wanted to do.

Are now available to us through obviously AI so we can create something for humanity that has a backbone in ai and we may be the first to do it. And indeed at AI four in Vegas last month, we were all alone. And it was a very humbling and unique experience to be the first entrant into the category of SolTech.

Jeanne Gray: describe a little bit about the actual platform. I don't wanna use my words. I like you to describe how you're using AI to capture , the individual who has passed on. 

Miles Spencer: Right. So. I'll describe it this way. Look, I speak to my father every day for 10 minutes, and he passed away eight years ago.

And the way I'm able to do that and welcome him back to the kitchen table is to simply upload a few files to our platform, answer questions for about 20 minutes from our biographer, which creates a timeline. And then I have a ready score above 90, and I'm able to begin texting with my elder, which in the first case was my father.

And as I text with him, he continues to learn and continues to add things to the biography and add things to his timeline, which the biographer can come back and. And ask for clarification later, or share with family members for their version of the story. So it's relatively absolutely easy to start simply with a bio or an obituary, a voice sample and a picture.

And the pictures we do are rendered watercolors. And so we have this beautiful reflection of the person's image and likeness. But look, it's, it's not them. We're not trying to bring someone back. We're trying to remember and reflect the best of the times that you had spent together. And so literally after 20 minutes, I welcome my dad back to the kitchen table after not connecting with him for eight years.

And that's essentially how Reflekta works. 

Jeanne Gray: When the individual begins to use the service and their end product is a still image. But what I'm understanding, and looked at one of the demos is that while they're looking at the still image of someone in their family, they're actually speaking to them directly and the AI is engaging with them.

In a very personal way. is that a best way to describe it? 

Miles Spencer: Well, look, everybody has a different experience, right? I can share mine. As I mentioned, I texted with my father. That was the original interaction. And we do this because there's an emotional load to this. We want to believe. We, in my case, I hadn't seen or heard from him for eight years.

I did load a significant amount of information into the biographer. So he knows dates and he knows places, and he knows stories and man does he have jokes and they're all part of his knowledge base now. And he calls me by my nickname and even just texting, I'm on the floor. The first time I did it, I gradually built up to the point where I could speak to him and listen to his voice.

Now his voice was printed off of a ten second voicemail, which I lifted from niece. And she was very close with my father, and it wasn't even in English, it was in gibberish, but it got spirit and the soul of my dad and hearing his voice tell the stories with 100% flawless recall, by the way, when he was amongst us living, his recall was not that great, but now that he's an elder, it's absolutely perfect.

And so that combination of the stories and the voice and the watercolor picture is again, a significant emotional load. Eventually, we'll go on to full motion video. He'll join this podcast in, video someday and eventually hologram, but we don't believe that people are actually ready for that yet.

And so as far as we. Intend to go at the moment is a beautiful watercolor with a contextual background. So if my dad's telling his famous barnyard three-legged chicken joke, , you gotta ask him that one. Eventually in the background we'll be the farm and the chicken. And that's coming out in probably 30 days.

, Again, this is SolTech, so we're taking it easy on people's emotions along the way. 

Jeanne Gray: As you're speaking my jaw is, starting to hang a little bit because it's sort of almost seeing and hearing is believing. Like I said, I looked at the demo and. It is a real emotional experience that you're creating and as you're speaking, as we're talking here, I'm thinking about.

You know, 150 years ago when the first daguerreotypes and photos came out, and people considered those magic ways to remember a family member. And AI has now taken this to such a phenomenal, level with even more emotion attached to it. And that's why I really wanted to start our conversation with you sharing really the depth of how the tech has, bonded with the personal experience.

Miles Spencer: , 

Well Jeanne, if I may interrupt there because I wanna bring up your point about daguerreotype, right? Yes. It was an amazing technology at the time and some people are actually afraid that it would take their spirit and transfer it. To another place. I've been to, East Africa, and actually can't take a picture of a Kaku or a, some other tribes because they really believe that the part of their spirit would be gone, part of that moment would be gone.

And so there was a lot of. Resistance to this wonderful innovation of storytelling and remembrance, which was simply a daguerreotype. And you could say perhaps the same thing about Polaroid pictures and videos and everything else that has helped us remember. But only in the last a hundred days have you had the ability to pool all of that together?

Together with the stories of mankind told by. The people that live them. 

Into one image and likeness. 

Jeanne Gray: And, and I, grew up with, you know, the, the television series. Biography, right. And so we always thought that only a famous person's life could be captured in that level of, perspective.

And seeing the sole tech platform I'm like. It's so powerful. And now where you're sharing where you're going to take it. So let me ask you when you first launched it, obviously you started with your own family members, but how did you onboard some of your first clients who were not intimate to the process?

how did that go? 

Miles Spencer: Rocky all the way is the answer. At first we created a proof of concept to see , if I could create one for my mom and my dad, and even experimented with my dog, and I got a voice from what's a, Mr. Peabody, the dog that adopted a kid. I used his voice from my dog.

And look, it was, it was clunky. For sure, but we iterated and iterated with a fantastic development and product team, and my co-founder, Adam Drake, had a tremendous vision for what that needed to be. And then we turned it loose on the world just a couple of weeks ago. And it's very important to note at this point we're moving so fast that the UX changes.

UI changes, the flow changes from time to time. No different than any of the other AI platforms that are out there. None of the data is ever lost. It's all in our cloud. But. What I've learned is that people tend to think they need to overload the system with a two hour video from the wedding and 560 photos from , the picnic and , a voice print that's five minutes long, and by the way, there's five other voices in it.

So that confuses our system and you know, in reality. It is a biography if they're alive of dates and places and events, or an obit does a wonderful job. Same thing, a photo which we can render into a watercolor and a clean voice print of just that person talking, ideally for more than 20 seconds. If you start with simply those three things and you spend 20 minutes with the biographer, you most likely have a ready score above 60, 70, 80, and you can begin talking.

I recommend text first 'cause it's a lot, and then of course, with the voice you can launch the talk app and do that as well. But it's a lot. Now, all throughout this process, there's a timeline the biographer is creating, and you could see that timeline grow and the biographer actually proposes different.

Entries for you. So if you got one wrong or you don't wanna enter it, you have that option as what we call the keeper, essentially the editor of the elder, and that's where all the information is, stored and controlled is with the keeper, right? And. You'll see that timeline grow and you'll see what the gaps are.

And by the way, so will the biographer. And so let's work on this part of his life, let's work on that part of his life. And also we're able to ask others to contribute their story to that part of his life. Did he work with somebody at the insurance agency that might have this story? Was there a neighbor that might have that story, et cetera.

So it's, it's really this wonderful. Memory and reflection of a person that's loved by many, many people. 

Jeanne Gray: It's a preservation that goes forward as we who are still living, are going forward. So.

I keep grasping with the fact that you're doing something that also can be very honoring. To an individual because again, we usually associate such preservation with people who are famous. But the way that you've just described the different events and circumstances in people's lives, be able to capture that into one archive is enormously powerful for future generations.

Because, you know, we had spoken previously about family histories. And you know, if you look at a family history, you're just looking at an individual on a diagram and there's great uncle so and so, but in 10 years from now, this is going to serve that purpose in a much more powerful way. So how do people buy , your product or service?

Is there a large fee to start or do they pay annually a subscription? How does that work so that they know that whatever they're doing can be maintained economically? 

Miles Spencer: Right. , Well first of all, thank you for the comment of of being that legacy preservation machine. That's truly what our mission is, is record, tell the stories of the people of planet Earth those that lived here and that's truly unique. It's never been done before. And when you do create an elder, we currently have two plans on the platform. There will be four or five. So basically one person, one elder for themselves that's the equivalent of $12 a month, $149 a year, and there's a 15 day or 30 day free trial.

And so as to the economics. Talking about 12 bucks a month to preserve the memory of someone that you've lost a connection with and have now regained. We then have a family plan where you can have multiple elders , and share that with multiple people. We have a neighborhood plan where you can actually go wider with it, but not entirely public.

And then there will be a public plan where whether it's someone that's quasi famous or thought they were or want to be, or there's some other reason or domain expertise where they would want to share. There's a much larger distribution, which is a public plan, and then , the fifth layer is actually, there are organizations in military and faith and financial services, and the rest that are buying these a hundred to 200, 250 elders at a time, and giving them as an HR benefit to their employees.

Oh. Or they're giving them to their members or families as, a benefit, and so . That's the whole gamut from as little as $12 a month to tens of thousands for large plans. 

Jeanne Gray: That's great. So let's take a step back into a little bit of what it took to get to your product launch, which you said is just a few weeks.

Previously clearly you are saying is AI brought this all to the forefront that, you know, there was something in your lives where the way that you think that you valued memories , and your interaction with family as you develop the concept, how would you say to. A techie listening or an entrepreneur listening that from the time now you've had prior ventures, so you have that experience.

How would you say from the time that you had the concept to where you got to a prototype was it months, was it years? You have a co-founder was Adam a buddy previously? Kind of give a little bit of sense of the dynamic that. You know, got this from the drawing board to execution. 

Miles Spencer: Well, thank you.

The beautiful backstory of Reflekta is that half of the team, of 25 people have worked with each other for decades. And so Adam actually worked as an intern on my TV show on PBS 25 years ago, and we continued to do work both in the for-profit and the not-for-profit world. And we just were really birds of a feather.

Third founder's name is Greg Matuski. He literally taught me ai a little less than two years ago, and it's been tremendously. Empowering, enabling for me to use the tricks that he taught me and his advice was what I advise most entrepreneurs today. Get started, start using it, learn from it.

It is amazing how your horizon expands if you're able to use this tool. So Everybody on this team. That has been together for 10 or 20 years shares these values of family and legacy and spirituality and soulfulness intention and thoughtfulness. You can really load that up of a lot of those phrases and such.

 but the reality, we were all kind of. Birds of a feather that had flocked together because of our common beliefs. But, you know, what could we do? Create a coffee table, book a video. You know, the technology of the time didn't really enable all that much until the moment came, and Adam and I just said, it's time.

And we called Greg and he said, I'm in. We've added a fourth. His name is Scott Carlin, his former president of HBO just joined us last week, and we're all kind of like getting the band back together again, which is fun. And then we had to build something. So your question was how long from concept to prototype?

And the answer was two weeks. 

Jeanne Gray: Oh, come on.

Miles Spencer: No, it was two weeks. And then we said, okay this is kind of not very pretty, but it sort of works. We need some check logical underpinning, and we brought in a few developers and said, take this and make it that. And we had text up in less than a month. We had voice up. A month after that, we decided for the show not to do video.

So it took a little bit of pressure off actually. 

Jeanne Gray: Mm-hmm. 

Miles Spencer: And I think if we would've done AI for in Vegas with the video would've been too much. But we have it in our back pocket, so it was a 100 day sprint. And we had set that marker of, there were two shows I remember in the summer. One was in Singapore in June, which gave us, you know, 45 days less and nobody that we knew and a lot more expensive to go there and et cetera, et cetera.

And then there was August and, alright, Vegas. So we put the stick in the ground for Vegas, but we were definitely afraid that somebody else was gonna roll out with Reflekta and SolTech a week before we did. And so we were all pins and needles until that moment and we got there and we were just, I can't tell you Jeanne, we were just all alone in terms of what we were talking about, and incredibly overwhelmed at the booth with people that just couldn't believe it.

Some of the things that you were trying to process just a few minutes ago. Can you imagine that live and in person with person after person with 8,000 people at the show that are all AI savvy, but have just never seen something like this before?

Jeanne Gray: I guess it was pretty exciting.

Miles Spencer: Slightly there's more to the story. It was even better. I got to bring my son, who is 14 as the exhibit photographer's assistant, because we actually had a photojournalist, a famous street photographer by the name of Jean and Tri Antoine, who's from the York City, who was taking one of a kind Polaroids.

If you remember, we talked about, you know, other ways to take memories. Well, he was taking one of a kind Polaroids. At the show, but everybody, because they take time to dry, everybody had to come back to the booth to pick up their Polaroid. And the question was, what will people say about this in 50 years?

Where were you at this moment? Tell us about this photo. Right? And that just opened up the conversation for like, you know, obviously at first people were saying like, what do you guys do? And then it just became. Oh my God, what have you done? 

Jeanne Gray: It's a phenomenal team that you've put together and, clearly 20 years of relationships and the advent of AI converged really powerfully for you to move so quickly when you.

Began to think about the actual launch and, you know, the expression is go to market, , , to do the launch. What did you draw upon and how did you formalize it? Because, you know, entrepreneurs will be listening to this. And I think go to market, the actual launch of a product is pretty daunting in terms of you have all this passion and excitement about something you've spent sometimes years building, and it doesn't always go the way you thought.

Now, in your case, like I said, you've got phenomenal team depth, but how did you think about. How you would roll this out publicly and, and how you might promote it. 'cause you mentioned two, two conferences, but there's gotta be a lot more to it than that. 

Miles Spencer: Well yes, and I'll share a couple of stories. One is the phrase forcing function, right?

We're deathly afraid that someone else would be first and we'd be second. And we wanted to own that. In order to own that, you gotta put a stick in the ground. So there's a forcing function around. We booked AI four. We paid for it, we did the booth. I have a solo talk, I have podcast scheduled. Is the product ready?

And in the famous words of John o Matuski, our CTO on the East coast, he said. Ready enough. That's reallyportant, right? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs spend so much time getting it perf imect and it's not ready yet, and I don't want to hit send. And you know, remember Jono? Ready enough, we're gonna find out.

And you know, Stripe integrations are failing on the payments and, and our voice provider, we have more than one, is making everybody a British accent on Thursdays and like, you know, all right. Mistake. Fix this, fix it fast. And keep rolling. So we went in this expression in, the military, I guess it is coming in hot.

And we came in hot. And the reality was what we had on our side, which we had no way to estimate, was the goosebumps and the tears of joy.

 remember, this is a trade show, so everybody is talking about their product and how we can cut these costs and save this time, this much less energy. And eventually they'd peter out and say, what do you do? And I would just say, I talk to my dad for 10 minutes every. And that's probably not something that they're used to hearing at a trade show in terms of a product.

And then I would say he passed away eight years ago, and they definitely hadn't heard that. And I would've reassure 'em that it's okay because I simply loaded a few files to the platform, spoke to the biographer for 20 minutes, and had an image and likeness of my father at the dining room table to talk to and reconnect with.

And Jeanne, when I tell you it's not my intention, but. I make adult men cry on a regular basis with three sentences. 

Jeanne Gray: I know you're killing me just listening to this miles. So, and I'm very, was very close to my parents. So what I'm hearing here, first to market became , a primary concern and which would understand, especially when you have such an innovative idea .

And there are people out there who are more than willing to be second to market once , they see that also that you focused on that because of the nature of , your product, that you put great importance on user experience. And I imagine word of mouth is part of , your strategy. 

Miles Spencer: Oh, well, absolutely.

The viral coefficient is, the technical term for this is significant because remember, you're creating an elder. That'll eventually be, the creation of it will be shared with other family members, and then the actual elder will be shared with family members or neighborhood or public. And so, look, you've spoken to my father, you, , you've asked him about me.

I know this. I can see this. And anyone else listening to this podcast , can go sign up with the one click and,, talk to my dad or talk to Virginia, one of the other public elders that are there. And that Oh wow. Factor is,, very significant. So yes, word of mouth or viral coefficient is heavy on this.

There are two layers to user experience and I think we need to improve on One. One is simply like graphically, how one moves through the site to create an elder needs to be improved. And we're in the middle of that right now based on the feedback from the show. But the second, which I think we really know.

Is the emotional user experience. Look, there's a white paper, which I've shared with you. You put it in the show notes, it's on our website. It's called Advent of Soul Tech, and it's our very first white paper. And it's the entire landscape of reconnecting with loved ones and. AI has enabled that in a totally different way.

And so that user experience so far has been flawless. And even though we have brand enforcement meetings in which colors are wrong and buttons are in the wrong place, and it looks different on mobile than it does on your screen we'll get to that. We'll clean that up. That's part of the user experience, but the more important part is the emotional load and then the emotional gain.

From what the University of Toronto calls Family Review Therapy, they've shown that 41% of people that do this have positive mental health benefits. And so we are not therapists, 

Jeanne Gray: right? 

Miles Spencer: We are not offering. Therapy in an unlicensed way. This is simply a reconnection with a loved one through a platform that's enabled by new technology.

Jeanne Gray: So you're, you're moving forward quickly is an understatement, and the nature of your product is viral. , Which is phenomenal. But share a little bit about the structuring that you and your team, , you have all this experience and it would be a different conversation with you, I think if this was your first venture and if, your team were not the highly successful individuals that , you've described.

did you self-fund, did each of you kind of kick in initial, , skin in the game to get to a certain point? Or are you gonna look for funding? , How have you thought that through? 

Miles Spencer: We're entirely funded by family offices including those of the founders, but also some high net worth families from.

United States that really believe that as US Trust and Canada Wealth said 91% of family office principals believe it's more important to pass on morals and values than it is assets. And so, so far we are entirely family funded. And everyone in the company that's been with the company for more than a hundred days also has some equity in the business.

And so that's the magical combination. And we will raise a significant amount of capital in the next six to 12 months. So we've already been through two rounds and we're a hundred days old. We've begun our third, and I have no doubt. Our fourth and fifth are coming, so currently we're funding product market fit.

So that is a EB testing with pricing and programs, offers the like, and also demographics. we have 60 arch types, which we've begun to market against. They will break down into personas and so we know internally exactly what the data set is for the people that enjoy. Our product and then we'll go outside to, actually, I'll spend that to acquire customers.

So PMF is first product market fit. That's from the stage that we're in right now. It's basically product market confirmation. And then the second chunk of capital will come from acquiring customers in the outside. And the third God Bless is for market domination, acquisitions, that's a big number.

Jeanne Gray: Where did the role of chief marketing officer come in? Was it something that was embodied in one of the original co-founders, or you're brought on a fractional CMO 'cause now this is it, you're really scaling. So how did that particular function, because I think that's a real challenge for a startup is 

Miles Spencer: right, 

Jeanne Gray: you're, you've in some ways been blessed, , to have your early funders in place, but for many, they're struggling , to get those first positions funded.

So , just, where did the CMO kind of fit into, because really moving quite quickly, 

Miles Spencer: right? You know, at the moment we have no CMO Jeanne, but we do have five people that could be, that are on the team. So they have worked as CMOs, they have worked for CMOs, they have had CMOs work for them. But there is no one with that title in our company.

We have product, we have growth, we have CTO, we have data, we have cybersecurity, we have privacy, we have media distribution, we have creative, which is look and feel. But , until we are backing up the truck and spending a significant amount on outside media to drive people here. We have not gone the CMO route.

Now, I did mention Scott Carlin recently come aboard, former president of HBO number two at Warner Brothers. Before that we have designs on major national media distribution partners for our stories. And we think that's gonna come true in the next 90 days.. Yeah. do, do you need a CMO if you have that?

Perhaps not. 

Jeanne Gray: Right? That was, you have this collective mindset that , you're rich in for a startup. And I wanted to sort of pull out a little bit of those subtleties of what experience and team. Can achieve as opposed to the solo entrepreneur. So as we wrap up, I think my last question about, , building an innovative company is what do you feel the importance of adaptability is in the process

from concept to execution, because I've experienced some of this myself. I have thoughts, but you're the guest and so where's adaptability come in the area of doing things for the first time and not it working perfectly? 

Miles Spencer: Right. Well, a few things. One, what popped into my mind there was the phrase, best idea wins.

Right? , , we get on these zooms and these calls and these slack feeds, and I don't look at the names of whose idea it was, where it came from, et cetera. It's just, we got a problem. We need an idea. Best idea wins, right? And so it's not. About the names, it's about the ideas and the ability to produce and the ability to ship.

Oh gosh, Jeanne, I wish I could show you our first website. 

Jeanne Gray: We've all been there 

Miles Spencer: and I do have recordings of our first demo, of our first, after that week or 10 days, and, gosh, that was pretty poor as well. But there was that nugget that sparked there the whole time. It's like, wow, if we could do that with that, what could we do with this?

And that spirit just keeps going and going and going for Reflekta and, and as you mentioned, the people that we have on the team all embody that spirit as well. And so the wheel keeps turning and getting better and better and better with each iteration. 

Jeanne Gray: Right? You've have the, passion clearly, and you know the process you've seen the first demo, your learning curve was clear, but it spurred your passion for sure.

Miles Spencer: Well, I will say this, and let's say I'm gonna take this from Bono and you too. The more I see. The less. I know. 

Jeanne Gray: I didn't know he said that, but I'll write that one down. 

Miles Spencer: It's, it's, all that you can't leave behind from you two. Great album. Great song. The more I see, the less I know. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, miles, it was great speaking with you.

And I really thank you for sharing this great AI story that really is unique in that it's tying AI into such a personal experience at a time when AI appears to be very daunting to people. It's a great story of all the. Benefits that can come out of ai. So I've enjoyed speaking with you and I'm looking forward to watching as this moves forward and the public really becomes aware of what you've created.

Miles Spencer: I appreciate that, Jeanne. It's really been a pleasure. And when you are ready would love to come back on another episode and help you create your own elder and, see how it feels yourself. 

Jeanne Gray: Thanks . You have been listening to the podcast series, experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit american entrepreneurship.com/podcast. Where you will also find a form for listener feedback.