Memory that belongs to you.
Penny is the first product from HelperLabs - built by two brothers on a simple conviction: the memory an AI builds about you is yours to see, correct, carry, and keep.
Why we built Penny
We're brothers. For most of a year we were each building the same thing: a personal AI assistant, one apiece. We compared notes constantly and kept landing on the same question. What makes an assistant like this useful to the individual it works for?
Peter had 15 years of experience with an exceptional assistant. He ran communications for a company of more than a hundred thousand people, and worked beside an executive assistant who remembered everything. Every preference, every past decision, every person. She got more useful each year the more they worked together and the more she learned. In addition to being brilliant, what made her indispensable was continuity. Like her, today's AI models are plenty smart. What they lack is the part that knew you yesterday and will still know you tomorrow.
That part is memory, so we built it first. And we built it to belong to you rather than to whichever AI tool happens to hold it this year.
Neither of us looks like a software founder on paper. Aaron is a lawyer who co-authored a book on business ethics and is a full-time professor at a business school. Peter came up through film and then medicine. But both have decades of experience in and a passion for computing and tech. Together, our focus has been building something that's private, accountable, friendly, useful, and most importantly entirely yours.
Penny is the first thing we've shipped together: a secure, portable memory and productivity product that any AI tool can read and write, owned by the person it describes. We both trust and use Penny every day. The longer goal is the assistant we each set out to build, the kind that gets more useful the longer it knows you.
Check out the FAQ where we answer all kinds of questions, and we encourage you to reach out if you want to know more from us. We're confident you'll love using Penny as much as we do.
What we believe
The human is the point. Success is not "how capable is the AI" - it is "how much more effective is the person." Every decision routes back to that.
Memory should belong to the person it describes. You should be able to see it, correct it, delete it, and carry it into the tools you choose.
Trust needs receipts. Security claims are only useful when you can check them. That's why Penny pairs encryption with a public, tamper-evident access log.
Tools should change without making you start over. The AI landscape will keep moving. Your memories and notes should move above it.
Plain answers to hard questions. Where the honest answer is "no" or "not yet," we say so and explain the engineering why. You'll find those answers in our FAQ.
Personal and Productive AI
Simple. Secure. Seamless. Smart. If that's the memory you want your AI to have, the first 250 accounts join as founding members - $59 a year, locked for life.