Nectome 2026 retrospective (and our final pre-sale!)

Aurelia

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 straightforwardly works 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.

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:
- Money now is more valuable to us than money later as we build capacity.
- We want to give rationalists who wouldn't be able to afford the full price a chance to get in early.
- We expect some cards may be used earlier than 10 years.
- A discount at this point feels appropriate given that clients are sharing some of our startup risk.

Hey, I'm Johnny Skew and I work at Nectome. I've gotten some comments when sharing this with people along the lines of "humanity won't last long enough to unfreeze anyone." I want to write a brief comment on why I think preservation is important even though I'm not sure there's that much time left before transformative artificial intelligence which will probably kill us, and might otherwise shepherd us into a utopia, solve aging and scarcity, or otherwise make the world really weird and hard to reason about. These are my (Johnny Skew's) personal thoughts and not anything like a company stance, but they're my personal answers to "so why are you working on this even if you're very concerned about existential risk from AI."

First and foremost, I'm uncertain about the future, and in worlds where I'm wrong about the scope, effects, or presence of transformative AI, I think this is the *other* most important thing in the world. Nate Soares has a tweet I like about the "curse of cryonics", which is the idea that the exact kind of analytic thinker capable of looking past societal taboos and realizes that preservation is high-stakes and possible, is *also* the kind of person to realize they should go work on urgent existential risk. As a result, there are far more people who independently went into AI safety than went into preservation. In worlds where we hit unexpected walls in further development, solve alignment, or enact a pause, preservation is incredibly underexplored.

It's also true that some people and executives at frontier labs say that they're motivated by reaching a deathless utopia as soon as possible. Thousands of people die every hour, and it's cold comfort to say that we'll get to the good future eventually, if it means your parents won't see it. I think people often have a lot of trouble making good decisions when thinking about death, but I hope that we can remove or mitigate this sense of urgency, if we're able to progress towards making preservation possible for everyone who wants it.

In fact (and this is getting increasingly into the realm of the speculative, but so it goes), one important question is, if you do get a short-lived AI pause, how can you effectively use it? the thing that feels most salient to me is that, in some plausible worlds, preservation helps with AI safety. One of the few proposals for solving alignment quickly that seems possible to me is the one where we invent whole-brain emulation and then some brilliant and heroic researchers volunteer to be preserved and emulated and have the decades they need to solve the actual hard problems involved. A hundred years is about four days, if you're running at 10,000x speed.

To get *even further* into the realm of my own personal speculation, I think that preservation even makes some sense in world where we're totally doomed. For the same reasons I'm not very swayed by arguments about how superintelligences descended from modern frontier LLMs will be aligned-by-default because their training has inculcated them with human values, I'm also not that worried about infinite-torture-by-AI futures. It just doesn't seem to me like an unaligned ASI would care very much about our internal experiences. But preserved people aren't a threat, are cheap to maintain, and represent option value. If there might be civilizations out there which value sapient flourishing, an unaligned ASI might well keep some preserved people handy in case it can trade with them in the future. Maybe the last humans will wake up millions of years in the future in some sort of awesome cosmic terrarium to repopulate. For my money, that beats the hell out of extinction.

Some people also believe in the existence of an objective morality. I'm not bullish about this, but if a calculable objective morality does exist, then presumably an increasingly superintelligent AI would be able to eventually discover this, having crossed through a developmental period where it had killed all the humans, and would perhaps then regret its actions and seek to bring us back. Having preserved people already on hand is a good bet on leaving it with the tools to do so.

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