Earlier this year we ran a discount card sale from our post on LessWrong, and we were delighted by the outpouring of support, critique, and analysis we received. We ended up selling much more than we expected, and after the sale deadline ended people reached out to us saying that they missed the deadline for various reasons. We wanted to offer them (and the rest of the rationalist community) one more chance to get in on the deal before we officially launch in January next year because of all the support and encouragement we have gotten from this community in our last decade of research and development. So we have decided to run one last discount card sale, and this is the last sale we’re ever going to offer to individuals.[1] We want to make sure everyone in the extended rationalist community has a chance to get in on it.
The short version:
Nectome offers whole body, end-of-life preservation for future revival.
We believe that we can and should preserve people such that preservation straightforwardlyworks according to current neuroscience.
Good quality requires real constraints: preservation must start within 12 minutes after medical-aid-in-dying.
In March 2026 we announced preservation and our initial pre-sales in Less Dead.
From March to April 2026 we sold ~fifty pre-sales which together were worth ~$1.3M, mostly to LessWrongers.
We’ve raised substantial investment funding, including from Lightcone Commons.
We've doubled our team size and moved into a larger corporate office. We also doubled our lab space.
We've secured a beautiful location in Oregon where people can be preserved.
We successfully preserved our first client dog.
We're planning to open for human preservation mid-January.
Lots of people missed the last pre-sale, so today we're announcing our final discount card sale ever. You can get a ~10x discounted preservation if you buy before January 15th.
The rest of this post details what we've done so far in 2026 and some of our plans for 2027.
Research
At Nectome our guiding principle is that we only offer preservations that work. That's why we have so many constraints with our current protocol - it's the only way we know how to preserve the whole connectome. That said, we keenly feel our limitations. What do you do when someone dies unexpectedly? Is there any way to accommodate hospice deaths, instead of exclusively MAiD deaths? Under what circumstances, if any, can we extend the twelve-minute perfusion window?
That's why we approached Lightcone Commons with a proposal to research more flexible preservations. They judged our project to have enough potential that they invested ~$3M. In 2027 we will use this funding to investigate the limits of preservation and make preservation more flexible without compromising on quality.
Team Growth
In his excellent post "Nectome: All That I Know", Max Harms was optimistic about Nectome, and hoped for a bigger Nectome team. We've indeed seen a lot of growth over the last year: we hired an in-house general counsel, a second ops person, a chemist, a mechanical engineer, and several contractors including a fractional CFO. We anticipate adding a second preservation team[2] before the end of 2026.
All together, we've just about doubled the size of our team, moved into a bigger office, and expanded our lab! This is a growth rate I'm happy with; we've been able to maintain company culture and find excellent team members, while expanding our capacity as an organization. I expect we will double in size again in 2027, with an emphasis on the sales and marketing team.
Preservation Location
One of our big projects in 2026 has been finding a preservation location. We wanted somewhere comfortable and private for clients to spend a few days with their families before being preserved; our lab is very effective, but it isn't where anyone wants to say goodbye to their loved ones.
In the interest of maintaining the privacy of the location, we won't be publishing the address, but I'm happy to say that we now have somewhere we'll be proud to bring our clients. It's currently undergoing renovations to make it wheelchair-accessible, since I expect that many of our clients will have limited mobility. Construction should be finished in time for our official opening in January.
Equipment Upgrades
Our engineering team has been hard at work building version 3.0 of the mobile preservation lab.[3] Our in-house counsel isn't letting me post pictures, due to a high concentration of trade secrets, but early reviews describe it as "like stepping onto the bridge of the starship Enterprise" and "much less janky than the last version". In addition to looking really cool, the new design automates a lot of work that was previously manually controlled by the preservation team (like the cryoprotectant ramp), and introduces a number of backup and failsafe features.
We've also built a compact, highly-automated rat preservation machine, which sits comfortably on a stainless steel cart and can run two rat preservations in parallel. This will be a force multiplier for our science team in terms of the ease of running experiments and we're excited to produce several new papers in 2027.
Pet Preservation
While we aren't officially open for business until January, we completed our first paid preservation earlier this year. The client was a well-loved family dog with a terminal cancer diagnosis, who traveled to Oregon along with her owners. Our team was able to preserve her, and she's currently being kept safe in cold long-term storage.
This was a big milestone for us, and we're grateful for the opportunity to train our team on some of the real-world messiness that comes with real preservations: outside medical (well, veterinary) professionals, a grieving family, an infirm client, and dignified long-term storage. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of all these over the coming year.
Sale details
All-in-all it's been a pivotal year for Nectome and I think we're set up for success in 2027. For those who are interested, here's the details of our preservation discount card:
You pay us $29k, once, and get the card (and a beautiful welcome packet, including a cool metal wallet card).
The card gives you a discount to our current preservation price depending on how long you've had the card. After ten years, the preservation is free.
Whenever you want, you can redeem the card for a discounted (or free, if it’s been at least ten years) preservation on anyone eligible.
To be eligible, they must be terminally ill, capable of traveling to a preservation location (currently only in Portland, Oregon), and able to consent to MAiD at the time of the procedure.
The person to be preserved signs paperwork with us detailing all their preferences, including revival restrictions, chain-of-custody, etc.
You buy a preservation, you get a preservation: if for some reason the person you designate can't be preserved, you can designate someone else.[4]
If a prudent person purchases a preservation discount card today and then uses their free preservation in ten years, that preservation will cost us more to perform than we made from the card (unless we have managed to substantially lower costs in our process by then.) Therefore, we're limiting our sale to 100 total discount cards,at a price of $29k each.[5] This is the last time we’ll offer an individual sale discount from our full price (currently $250,000).
Towards a brighter future, together
One of my dream jobs is to be the person on the other end of a preservation, who helps people rejoin the world. I want to see people's faces light up with the excitement that comes from new technologies, new stories, new places to go. I want to show people the endings to their favorite webcomics and glowfic threads they never got to finish before they were preserved. I want to plan "welcome home" parties where revivees meet their relatives and great-great grandchildren. I want to help people grieve their losses and live with the survivor's guilt they've suffered from living in a world before it learned how to take care of itself. I think I'll be good at that part, because I'll know that pain personally. I want to see the projects that people start when they know they will be alive for as long as they want.
I don't know if I'll even be qualified for such an important job in the future. But I do hope to be preserved myself, one day, and later wake up in the company of some of the people who I helped preserve along the way. I hope as preservation becomes more popular we can all learn to think longer-term, safe in the knowledge that we have the time to build the future right, starting today, and still be part of it ourselves.
We don’t want to rule out, for instance, preservation as an employment benefit for companies, or having it be part of a medical health plan. We’d love to be available through Medicare eventually! But this is the last time we’re going to offer an individually discounted price.
Currently our preservation team is Borys, Anna L, and myself working together with support from everyone else at Nectome. I anticipate in 2027 a second dedicated team makes sense, so I'm hiring preservationists right now. I want two good people who can become senior team leads as we grow. If you think you want to be a preservationist, email me at a@nectome.com and let's talk. You have a chance to be a leader in a new and rapidly expanding profession that will bring hope to millions!
I've built around 11 different perfusion machine versions over the years, designed to perfuse mice, rats, rabbits, pigs, sheep, and humans. At one point, I had a version that could fit inside the trunk of a car and be deployed at a funeral home in ~5 hours. The current mobile truck design is the best version we've made so far, giving us substantial flexibility for preserving people, data logging, etc. At some point, I might write a “history of perfusion machines” post if people are interested.
Earlier this year we ran a discount card sale from our post on LessWrong, and we were delighted by the outpouring of support, critique, and analysis we received. We ended up selling much more than we expected, and after the sale deadline ended people reached out to us saying that they missed the deadline for various reasons. We wanted to offer them (and the rest of the rationalist community) one more chance to get in on the deal before we officially launch in January next year because of all the support and encouragement we have gotten from this community in our last decade of research and development. So we have decided to run one last discount card sale, and this is the last sale we’re ever going to offer to individuals.[1] We want to make sure everyone in the extended rationalist community has a chance to get in on it.
The short version:
The rest of this post details what we've done so far in 2026 and some of our plans for 2027.
Research
At Nectome our guiding principle is that we only offer preservations that work. That's why we have so many constraints with our current protocol - it's the only way we know how to preserve the whole connectome. That said, we keenly feel our limitations. What do you do when someone dies unexpectedly? Is there any way to accommodate hospice deaths, instead of exclusively MAiD deaths? Under what circumstances, if any, can we extend the twelve-minute perfusion window?
That's why we approached Lightcone Commons with a proposal to research more flexible preservations. They judged our project to have enough potential that they invested ~$3M. In 2027 we will use this funding to investigate the limits of preservation and make preservation more flexible without compromising on quality.
Team Growth
In his excellent post "Nectome: All That I Know", Max Harms was optimistic about Nectome, and hoped for a bigger Nectome team. We've indeed seen a lot of growth over the last year: we hired an in-house general counsel, a second ops person, a chemist, a mechanical engineer, and several contractors including a fractional CFO. We anticipate adding a second preservation team[2] before the end of 2026.
All together, we've just about doubled the size of our team, moved into a bigger office, and expanded our lab! This is a growth rate I'm happy with; we've been able to maintain company culture and find excellent team members, while expanding our capacity as an organization. I expect we will double in size again in 2027, with an emphasis on the sales and marketing team.
Preservation Location
One of our big projects in 2026 has been finding a preservation location. We wanted somewhere comfortable and private for clients to spend a few days with their families before being preserved; our lab is very effective, but it isn't where anyone wants to say goodbye to their loved ones.
In the interest of maintaining the privacy of the location, we won't be publishing the address, but I'm happy to say that we now have somewhere we'll be proud to bring our clients. It's currently undergoing renovations to make it wheelchair-accessible, since I expect that many of our clients will have limited mobility. Construction should be finished in time for our official opening in January.
Equipment Upgrades
Our engineering team has been hard at work building version 3.0 of the mobile preservation lab.[3] Our in-house counsel isn't letting me post pictures, due to a high concentration of trade secrets, but early reviews describe it as "like stepping onto the bridge of the starship Enterprise" and "much less janky than the last version". In addition to looking really cool, the new design automates a lot of work that was previously manually controlled by the preservation team (like the cryoprotectant ramp), and introduces a number of backup and failsafe features.
We've also built a compact, highly-automated rat preservation machine, which sits comfortably on a stainless steel cart and can run two rat preservations in parallel. This will be a force multiplier for our science team in terms of the ease of running experiments and we're excited to produce several new papers in 2027.
Pet Preservation
While we aren't officially open for business until January, we completed our first paid preservation earlier this year. The client was a well-loved family dog with a terminal cancer diagnosis, who traveled to Oregon along with her owners. Our team was able to preserve her, and she's currently being kept safe in cold long-term storage.
This was a big milestone for us, and we're grateful for the opportunity to train our team on some of the real-world messiness that comes with real preservations: outside medical (well, veterinary) professionals, a grieving family, an infirm client, and dignified long-term storage. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of all these over the coming year.
Sale details
All-in-all it's been a pivotal year for Nectome and I think we're set up for success in 2027. For those who are interested, here's the details of our preservation discount card:
If a prudent person purchases a preservation discount card today and then uses their free preservation in ten years, that preservation will cost us more to perform than we made from the card (unless we have managed to substantially lower costs in our process by then.) Therefore, we're limiting our sale to 100 total discount cards, at a price of $29k each.[5] This is the last time we’ll offer an individual sale discount from our full price (currently $250,000).
Towards a brighter future, together
One of my dream jobs is to be the person on the other end of a preservation, who helps people rejoin the world. I want to see people's faces light up with the excitement that comes from new technologies, new stories, new places to go. I want to show people the endings to their favorite webcomics and glowfic threads they never got to finish before they were preserved. I want to plan "welcome home" parties where revivees meet their relatives and great-great grandchildren. I want to help people grieve their losses and live with the survivor's guilt they've suffered from living in a world before it learned how to take care of itself. I think I'll be good at that part, because I'll know that pain personally. I want to see the projects that people start when they know they will be alive for as long as they want.
I don't know if I'll even be qualified for such an important job in the future. But I do hope to be preserved myself, one day, and later wake up in the company of some of the people who I helped preserve along the way. I hope as preservation becomes more popular we can all learn to think longer-term, safe in the knowledge that we have the time to build the future right, starting today, and still be part of it ourselves.
Let's go to the future, together, with love.
Aurelia Song
We don’t want to rule out, for instance, preservation as an employment benefit for companies, or having it be part of a medical health plan. We’d love to be available through Medicare eventually! But this is the last time we’re going to offer an individually discounted price.
Currently our preservation team is Borys, Anna L, and myself working together with support from everyone else at Nectome. I anticipate in 2027 a second dedicated team makes sense, so I'm hiring preservationists right now. I want two good people who can become senior team leads as we grow. If you think you want to be a preservationist, email me at a@nectome.com and let's talk. You have a chance to be a leader in a new and rapidly expanding profession that will bring hope to millions!
I've built around 11 different perfusion machine versions over the years, designed to perfuse mice, rats, rabbits, pigs, sheep, and humans. At one point, I had a version that could fit inside the trunk of a car and be deployed at a funeral home in ~5 hours. The current mobile truck design is the best version we've made so far, giving us substantial flexibility for preserving people, data logging, etc. At some point, I might write a “history of perfusion machines” post if people are interested.
If you die before designating someone, your estate gets the discount card, like any other property you own.
You may ask, given this, why are we offering the sale at all? A few reasons: