About Codex Vitae

Codex Vitae is the only platform that organizes a person's entire digital life, generates a narrative from it, and legally executes their wishes for what happens to it after death. It was not built because a gap was identified in a market. It was built because the founder watched someone he loved leave without it, and then realized he was equally unprepared himself.

The name Codex Vitae, Latin for “Book of Life,” reflects the company's founding belief: that every person's digital life tells a story worth preserving, and that story deserves infrastructure built specifically to protect it.

Unlike general-purpose cloud storage or password managers, Codex Vitae is purpose-built for legacy. Every feature, every design decision, and every security protocol is oriented around a single question: What happens to your digital life when you're no longer here to manage it?

Our Vision

We envision a world where preparing your digital legacy is as natural and expected as preparing a will, where every person has the tools to organize their digital life, document their wishes, and ensure that the people they love receive the memories and messages that matter most.

Codex Vitae is building toward a future where digital legacy infrastructure is embedded into estate planning, healthcare transitions, and end-of-life care, where the question is not whether to prepare your digital legacy, but how.

The Founder's Story

In early 2024, Joshua Patterson lost a close friend. A musician. A parent. A light in many lives.

As this friend entered their final days, a community gathered online, sharing photographs, videos, memories, keeping vigil together across continents. It was deeply moving. And then a question appeared that would not let go: what happens to this? How does that child, years from now, access these moments? Who has the rights to preserve them, share them, or protect them from being lost?

That experience opened his eyes to what he came to call the silent crisis of the digital afterlife. The platforms hold the content. The families hold the grief. No infrastructure exists to bridge them.

In 2025, his own mother faced a sudden health scare. The theoretical became immediate. Decades of her digital life, school papers, photographs, journals, the evidence of who she is, suddenly felt fragile and finite. What would she want protected? What would she want him to find? And how would he manage any of it while also being her son?

Then he turned the lens on himself. A web developer since the 1990s. A digital creator. Terabytes of personal data, hundreds of thousands of photographs, old phones and computers, private memories, his children's lives, past relationships, things he would not want anyone to encounter without context. He had exactly two options: delete it all now, or curate it all now. At 45, both were impossible.

Finding that no third option existed, he built one. That platform is Codex Vitae.