The company was born out of experience.

Chelsie Patterson, CEO and Jeff Borders, CTO, attended eight weddings together in 2018. One by one, for each wedding, they added money to a honeymoon fund or wrote a last-minute check and put it in a store-bought card. By the time they got to their last wedding, they realized that weddings were one of the only things they used their checkbook for any more. For important events like weddings, checks felt old-fashioned and inconvenient, online registries seemed too transactional while existing services like Venmo were too casual and impersonal.

Chelsie explored whether her idea had traction. She started talking to friends with similar pain points and went on an internet scavenger hunt to see if anything like it already existed. Simultaneously, Jeff started researching the technical side of their proposed application. As a result, Chelsie and Jeff, founded Give Memento Inc., a personalized digital cash gifting company that commemorates big events like, weddings and graduations.

Passion for entrepreneurship runs their family. Chelsie’s parents have owned and operated their own wholesale and retail seafood company since 1983 . When Chelsie was 22 and backpacking around the world, she started a project called R.A.G.S tags (Random Acts of Goodness), where people could share good deeds on a self-built Wordpress website. Then, at 25, she created a game called craption and launched it on Kickstarter. Jeff’s parents also owned and operated their own veterinary clinic and he co-founded his first tech company immediately after college. Accordingly, their entrepreneurial spirit played an important role in spurring Chelsie and Jeff to launch Memento. In 2019, Chelsie and Jeff were accepted into the University of Chicago Polsky Accelerator Program to work on their idea and develop their proof of concept and in April of 2020 they officially launched Memento on the Apple app and Google Play stores.