After Losing His Grandmother Josiah Faison Launched A Startup To Preserve Stories Of Loved Ones – AfroTech
Josiah Faison is leveraging tech to help people preserve their stories.
The Maryland native originally planned for a career in financial management. During his sophomore year at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), his grandmother became terminally ill with cancer. Faison wanted to ensure her lived experiences would continue to live on.
This prompted him to search online for different ways to capture the family history. He was met with no luck. So, he planned to create a time capsule that would include letters and recordings detailing her life. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he was unable to make it home, and his grandmother passed away.
“All my family’s history was lost. All the stories that she’d been trying to preserve, all the stories she had done to me, were all just gone. That caused me to actually change gears,” Faison told AFROTECH™.
Faison workshopped the idea, which centered on history preservation through photography, video, and audio.
In the summer of his junior year, he was accepted into the RIT Simone Center Student Accelerator Program. During that time, he spoke with hundreds of individuals and families to determine whether they had faced similar challenges, and he said the response was an overwhelming yes.
“We had one person who talked about how she wished that she had a solution to preserve her son’s legacy and his story because he was murdered when he was 17,” he recalled. “She wished there was a way for him to have somewhere for people to visit other than a gravestone.”
Oria
Faison said he received $10,000 in seed funding from the accelerator to support the launch of a tech startup. He is now the founder and chief operating officer of Oria, a cultural preservation startup that, according to its website, helps institutions, organizations, and communities collect, share, and archive oral histories. Its mobile app launched in 2024, followed by the web app the following year.
“As a Black person, we’ve had the ability to control our narrative, but we haven’t really had the true agency where anyone can preserve Black history, because we’ve mainly relied on institutions,” he explained. “What we found was that over 90% of stories are lost within three generations, especially when you think about how much more diverse the Black community is.”
Initially, Faison spoke with senior citizens in nursing homes and observed that many didn’t have loved ones to whom they could pass down stories. That insight led him to research organizations that could provide a way for them to preserve and share their personal histories. However, many of the ones he found had outdated infrastructure and tools.
Oria’s solution is its digital library, which can launch oral history campaigns in minutes by collecting stories using text, audio, or video prompts, according to its website. Oria features both a mobile app and a web app.
The web app is designed for family admins or organizations to create and manage oral history campaigns in as little as five minutes. After a campaign is launched, those topics addressed in the oral history appear in the mobile app for community members to participate in. As more responses are recorded, a digital library is created. The web app will then perform context mapping to better understand the stories and identify common themes.
The mobile app is geared toward small organizations and individuals. The community members can select topics and use recording tools to contribute content. Community members can choose a topic, and the stories they create will be stored on their profile. Each topic can be grouped into larger collections called genres. The platform also organizes those stories into a timeline of the person’s life, Faison said. Community members can also invite family members to participate.
“Before, a historical institution could hire 30-50 people and go collect stories in the community, whereas a small organization couldn’t, ’cause they didn’t have the funding and they didn’t have the software and hardware. Now we’ve made it so anyone can collect history on that institutional level … We’re democratizing history,” he said.
Faison also noted that the startup is leveraging AI through transcription technology that converts audio to text, transforming personal stories into easy-to-consume content that users can scroll through, play, or listen to. There is also a chat agent that will ask follow-up questions, making it easier to streamline research, connect the dots between stories, and detect themes, he noted.
Oria is currently used in more than 40 countries, primarily in the U.S., India, and Norway, Faison told AFROTECH™.
The company has received six-figure funding from angel investors since its inception. It is also supported by $25,000 in cloud credits from JPMorgan Chase’s 2026 startup program.
