Vancouver venture behind Legacy Sage pledges a summer internship and in-kind
investment, citing a shared mission: turning the lived wisdom of our elders into
knowledge that outlives them
(WorldFrontNews Editorial):- Vancouver, British Columbia Jun 21, 2026 (Issuewire.com) – Athena Foundry (athenafoundry.com), the Vancouver-based maker of the life-event orchestration platform Legacy Sage, today announced its support for Neer Gupta, a Vancouver high-school student recently recognized through the Rideau Hall Foundation’s Ingenious+ youth innovation challenge for his venture, The Living Library (livinglibrary.online).
As part of that support, Athena Foundry will offer Neer a summer internship and an in-kind investment to help bring his innovation closer to real-world impact. Ingenious+ is the Rideau Hall Foundation’s national youth innovation challenge for young people aged 14 to 18, recognizing those who build solutions to challenges they see in their communities and beyond. Now in its fifth year, the program awards regional and national prizes, along with mentorship and learning opportunities, and celebrates its recipients on a national stage during Canadian Innovation Week.
A shared mission
For Athena Foundry, the resonance was immediate. Legacy Sage is a life-event orchestration platform that helps families hold their wealth, their health decisions, and their wishes in one calm, secure place: quiet infrastructure for the things that matter most when life changes. A central thread of that work is capturing and faithfully transmitting human knowledge across generations: not just documents and dashboards, but the intentions, values, and stories that give them meaning.
The Living Library approaches the same human problem from the other end of the bridge, codifying a senior’s life experience and delivering that wisdom through AI so that the next generation can learn from it. Where Legacy Sage helps a family preserve and pass on what one household has built, The Living Library opens that same act of remembrance to an entire community.
“Neer has independently arrived at a question we think about every day: how do you keep a person’s wisdom alive and useful after the moment has passed? The Living Library is a beautifully human answer to that question, and it overlaps directly with the mission behind Legacy Sage. We’re proud to back a young Canadian who is already building the kind of intergenerational technology we believe the world needs.”
– Norman Sam, Director of Athena Foundry
What Athena Foundry is offering
A summer internship at Athena Foundry, giving Neer hands-on exposure to building and shipping AI-powered, life-event technology alongside the Legacy Sage team.
An in-kind investment in The Living Library, contributing engineering, design, and platform expertise rather than cash alone, to help the venture move from prototype to a deployable community network.
Mentorship spanning product, AI architecture, and go-to-market, building on the recognition and momentum Neer has earned through Ingenious+.
About Neer Gupta
Neer is a well-rounded young innovator who lives on the UBC campus in Vancouver and attends University Hill Secondary School. At just 14 years of age, he has already launched a few innovative and exciting projects like Shy Like Me, World of Wonders and A Class Crew.
Beyond the lab and the laptop, he is a serious athlete, recently featured as a City News Athlete of the Week, reflecting a rare balance of intellectual ambition and athletic discipline. That combination of curiosity, drive, and community-mindedness is exactly what drew Athena Foundry to him, and what Ingenious+ exists to celebrate.
About Athena Foundry
Athena Foundry is a Vancouver-based technology company and the maker of Legacy Sage, a life-event orchestration platform that helps families and their advisors hold wealth, health, and final wishes in one secure, continuously maintained system. Athena Foundry builds quiet infrastructure for the families and stewards who carry tomorrow. Learn more at athenafoundry.com.
About The Living Library
The Living Library is a community knowledge project connecting youth and seniors through voice and AI, turning elder wisdom into a searchable, voice-powered resource accessible through a mobile app, a retro virtual dial, a physical Story Hub, or a landline. Learn more at livinglibrary.online.
About Ingenious+
Ingenious+ is the Rideau Hall Foundation’s national youth innovation challenge, supporting Canadians aged 14 to 18 as they turn ideas into action through funding, mentorship, and a national platform. Recipients are celebrated during Canadian Innovation Week.
The Living Library is built on a simple, resonant idea: every elder is a library, and none should burn unread. The platform lets a young person pick up a phone (a mobile app, an in-app retro rotary dial, a physical “Story Hub,” or even a regular landline), ask a real question, and hear genuine, hard-won advice in an elder’s own voice. Behind the warmth of that interaction is a modern AI pipeline that transcribes spoken stories, stores them as meaning rather than keywords, and surfaces the elder experience that best answers what a young person is actually asking. In short, it turns decades of lived wisdom into a searchable, voice-powered knowledge system before that wisdom is lost.
