November the 3rd, 2022 - A very special application (app) by the Croatian startup Spiritus is turning graveyards into virtual museums, telling the stories of those lying at rest there.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Mladen Miletic writes, a team of Croatian tech experts from the Zagreb startup Spiritus has designed an application that turns cemeteries across the Republic of Croatia into virtual museums, and it has already attracted more than three million kuna in investments intended to expand this heartfelt idea to other European markets.

Through the application, the families of the deceased can write stories about their lives, as well as receive photo suggestions or stories about their loved ones that they may not have even known about. The Spiritus application was premiered in Vukovar, and on October the 31st, 2022, it arrived at almost all major cemeteries in the country.

"We've been preparing the project for more than a year now, and we hope that it will be recognised and supported by people. There are so many untold and inspiring life stories that we want to preserve for our descendants," explained Spiritus director Dino Jerkovic.

So far, the application has more than 700,000 memorials spanning more than 50 city cemeteries loaded into it, from Vukovar to Zagreb, Varazdin, Osijek, Karlovac and Split.

"We believe that every person who has ever lived has at least one story worth telling. These are often wonderful and inspiring life stories that will be forgotten over generations. We want to find such stories and enable families to keep hold of them forever," added Dino Jerkovic.

"We'd like to thank our previous partners for recognising the potential of this project and we're looking forward to future collaborations. The goal is that every family in Croatia has the opportunity to preserve the memories of their loved ones through technology. Pictures, stories and biographical information can remain indelible on the Internet, in fact they're eternal. As such, the memories of our grandparents can remain for all generations. Of course, we do check all of the content placed there. It's very important to us that all of the content on Spiritus is dignified and respectful of the deceased," concluded Jerkovic.

For more, make sure to check out our dedicated business section.

June the 25th, 2021 - A Croatian team behind a startup called Spiritus has developed an innovative platform through which every single person can leave their own digital trace.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Ivan Tominac writes, everyone walking this Earth will leave some sort of trace behind them as they go, and every human story is special and deserves to be told. A team of six Croatian students from the Spiritus platform for creating digital memories also took care of that, and thanks to them, every human's story will be just a single click away.

The idea to create the Spiritus platform was born from listening to the song "Andrija Cordaš" by some of the best Croatian tamburitza players, and the whole business and creative concept, which is entirely unique on the market, began from that very song.

Dino Jerkovic, one of the founders and director of the Spiritus platform, discussed the story behind this storytelling platform. Listening to the song with his colleague Marko Soljic, he came to the conclusion that every story is worth telling.

“Did you know that 99 percent of people who have ever lived are forgotten as if they never existed? It isn't known what they looked like, what they did, or even what their names were. One very ordinary evening, Marko and I hung out with the team and accidentally put two and two together. Since we’ve both been in the IT world for a few years now and we’ve already created one app together, we saw some huge potential for this project.

We hurried to the big board in our living room and recorded the skeleton of functionality which was later turned into the Spiritus startup. Through Spiritus, every person can make a digital memory of their loved one, and we'll enable the proper technology to keep that memory alive forever,'' said Jerkovic from Spiritus.

From the very beginning, they wanted to make Spiritus accessible to everyone, so they aimed to make the name simple and adapted it to a larger number of linguistic areas. On the other hand, as far as the concept of the application itself is concerned, they agreed that they must respect the three vital foundations in order to ensure the best possible user experience. Simple, nice to look at and above all - secure.

With each use of the platform, it's important to us that the user feels the above three points. As for the application itself, the core of our idea is that the user can easily, beautifully and securely create a digital memory in the form of stories, photos and videos. Specifically, the Keeper of Memories has the privilege of composing a multitude of individual stories about, let's say, their grandparents, inserting pictures or videos of what they looked like throughout their lives, and receive stories from other people about them and thus complete their memory of them.

In addition, Spiritus users will be able to set the location of their loved one’s grave within the app itself, and users walking through the city cemetery will receive a notification that a digital memory is near them. As such, the memory of a person is not just some stone with a name, surname, and their date of birth and death, but a set of stories about that person prepared by someone. The experience of walking through the city cemetery can thus become different and more inspiring,'' added Jerkovic.

Just like the stories that will be written on Spiritus, theirs is special in many ways. The Spiritus team was started by a group of Croatian philosophy students, and they proved that the study you come from is not really an important factor in starting your own business, by winning the largest student competition in the development of LUMEN applications.

In addition to having won awards, they have already managed to attract investments, and the one that helped them to achieve their goals is the one amounting to 50,000 euros from the Fil Rouge Capital Fund.

The story is unfolding all the time for Spiritus, and recently they have strengthened their team with a few new members.

“I can proudly say that our team is currently richer with some new members. Mateo Stjepanovic and Marin Grbic have become our new developers, and Petar Zeman is our designer who will enable the application to be truly beautiful,'' said Jerkovic. Their goal is to become the centre of the largest number of untold life stories out there, ie a symbol of digital memories.

“Our main goal is really to keep all the memories created within Spiritus eternal. Fortunately, blockchain technology can allow for that, and we're currently in the phase of inserting that revolutionary technology into the architecture of our system,'' explained Jerkovic.

"Currently, our application is in the testing phase and we believe that by the end of the month we'll have a ready application for the first Croatian users who have an Android device. Before autumn this year, our goal is an app placed on iOS devices and a web appl, and then we plan to scale the application to the English-speaking area,'' concluded Jerkovic.

For more, follow Made in Croatia.