--- title: "Why we are building Lifelong" description: "My father tore down two walls of our house to care for my grandfather. That is why I started Lifelong, and what the three of us are committing to." url: https://trylifelong.com/blog/why-we-are-building-lifelong --- [Inside Lifelong](https://trylifelong.com/blog/category/inside-lifelong) 19 August 2026, Updated 2 October 2026, 4 min read # Why we are building Lifelong My father tore down two walls of our house to care for my grandfather. That is why I started Lifelong, and what the three of us are committing to. ![Portrait of Razi Syed](https://trylifelong.com/about/razi.webp) [Razi Syed](https://trylifelong.com/about/razi-syed) Co-founder & CEO, Lifelong ![Three generations of a family laughing together outdoors](https://trylifelong.com/family/picnic.webp) My father tore down a wall in our house so a hospital bed could fit through the doorway. Then he tore down another one, in the bathroom, so my grandfather's wheelchair could get in and he could wash him properly. He bought the bed himself. He installed the hoist himself. He learned how to lift a grown man out of a chair without hurting either of them, and then he did it every day, for as long as it took. Nobody taught him any of this. There was no system, no service, no app, no one to call. There was a man who loved his father, and a house that was the wrong shape. So he changed the shape of the house. I think about that more than almost anything else in my life. It is why I started Lifelong. ## What I have that he did not I have not done one percent of what my father did, and I've been handed a thousand times his tools. That's not a comfortable thing to sit with. It is a very clarifying one. I have models that can read a decade of scattered medical history and tell you what changed. I have wearables sitting on the wrists of everyone in my family, most of them uncharged in a drawer. My father had a sledgehammer and a wall. If I can't do half of what he did with all of this, I've failed my family and the people I love. That's the actual stake for me. Ten years ago I started my first company, mettleAI. I built it because I wanted to become a better version of myself. That was genuinely the whole thesis. It worked. I sold it. I was proud of it. I was also aiming at the wrong thing. Becoming the best version of yourself is the prerequisite. You sharpen yourself so you can carry more. You get better tools so you can take care of the people who took care of you first. That's what Lifelong is, for me. ## Each of us has been the one in the room I did not start it alone. The three of us have known each other for four to five years. Gurleen Singh and I met working together at Sahha, and Param Singh is his brother. All three of us are on the [team page](https://trylifelong.com/about). The walls are my family's story. The seed of the product comes from theirs. Lifelong began as the shared record Param built of his grandmother's care in the last year of her life, so his family could prepare for each next step. We've spent months sitting in living rooms — more than 85 families — because that's where the actual care system is, and nobody was looking at it. We co-designed Lifelong with 14 multigenerational families over four months. ## The argument Every system we've built — hospitals, insurers, regulators, aged care — assumes the institution is where the knowing happens and the family is where the coping happens. That is exactly backwards. The institution holds the data. The family holds nothing and carries everything. So it falls where it has always fallen: on the daughter who becomes the medical historian. On the son who becomes the coordinator. On whoever in the family loves hardest and therefore learns fastest. Those people deserve to be the most powerful people in the room. Right now they're the least equipped. When someone loves a person enough, they will learn anything, ask anything, drive anywhere, tear down any wall. The bottleneck was never willingness. It was tooling. I make this argument at length in [The family is the unit of care](https://trylifelong.com/blog/the-family-is-the-unit-of-care). ## What we are committing to We're building the intelligence that stands behind them. It starts today as an app. Lifelong is a family health app for iPhone. Each person has their own space for medications, conditions, symptoms, appointments and documents, and each person chooses what family members can see. Alo, its AI assistant, answers from what you are allowed to see. It does not diagnose, and Lifelong is not medical care. What I believe, and cannot yet show you, is that the most important healthcare institution of this century will be the family, finally given the tools to act as one. I will not tell you software can replace the people who care. I will tell you it can make them more capable. If you're the one in your family who ends up holding all of it — the appointments, the medications, the name of the specialist, the worry — this was built for you specifically. My father moved walls for one man. We intend to move them for millions of families. I'm not interested in building anything smaller than that. Lifelong is a health information tool, not medical care. Nothing here is medical advice; for a decision about someone’s health, talk to their doctor. [Medical disclaimer](https://trylifelong.com/medical-disclaimer). [Back to all articles](https://trylifelong.com/blog) · [Read our mission](https://trylifelong.com/mission) ## Keep reading ### [The family is the unit of care](https://trylifelong.com/blog/the-family-is-the-unit-of-care) ![Two generations of a family laughing together in a field at sunset](https://trylifelong.com/family/golden.webp) · Inside LifelongEssay 19 August 2026 · Health does not happen one person at a time. A parent's prescription, a child's fever and a grandparent's appointment three time zones away are one story. · Razi Syed 2 min read ### [Introducing Alo, an AI health assistant for your family](https://trylifelong.com/blog/introducing-alo) ![The Alo mark beside the name Alo, above the line: A carer for your family](https://trylifelong.com/alo/film/alo-carer-for-your-family-landscape-poster.webp) · AI and healthNote 2 October 2026 · Alo is the AI assistant in Lifelong. It knows each person in your family, answers from their own records, and flags a change before you ask. · Razi Syed 6 min read ### [Can you trust an AI assistant with health questions?](https://trylifelong.com/blog/can-you-trust-ai-with-health-questions) AI and healthGuide 2 October 2026 · What an AI assistant does well with a family's health records, five steps to an answer you can rely on, and how Alo, the assistant in Lifelong, works. · Razi Syed 4 min read