How we got here
Ava Chen was a few weeks post-surgery and needed to show a pharmacist a photo of a prescription. The photo was somewhere in a camera roll of 9,000 images. It took sixteen minutes and three failed search terms to find a picture taken eleven days earlier. Sixteen minutes is not a memory problem. It is a retrieval problem.
Ava called Daniel Reyes, who had spent years building retrieval systems for products used at scale. They both knew what the hard version of the question was: not “how do you find things in a small collection”, but “how do you make a personal archive feel like part of your own cognition, without requiring you to annotate, tag, or file a single thing?”
Halo launched in March 2023. The mission is simple and deliberately narrow: give people back the useful things they save, without making them do any work to get there.