The Story Behind Hey Twin: Why We Built an App to Reunite Memories
Hey Twin started with a single photo our founder couldn't take. Here's the origin story and the team behind the app.
Jordan Lee
Co-Founder & CEO
Every product has an origin moment. Ours happened at a dinner table that was missing a chair.
The photo we couldn’t take
In 2024, our founder’s grandmother passed away a few months before a planned family reunion — the first time in over a decade the whole family would be in one place. The reunion happened. The photo got taken. But it was missing someone who, for fifty years, had been at the head of that exact table.
That gap is what started Hey Twin. Not as a “fun AR filter” idea, but as a genuine question: could we build something that puts people back in the photo, in a way that actually looks like they were there?
Why existing tools didn’t work
We tried the obvious things first — generic photo editors, manual layer compositing, even hiring a retoucher. Two problems kept showing up:
- Cutouts looked cut out. Hair, jewelry, and soft edges almost always left a visible halo or hard line.
- Composites looked composited. Even a perfect cutout looks wrong if the lighting, scale, or perspective doesn’t match the new scene.
Solving the first problem meant building our own on-device matting model instead of relying off-the-shelf segmentation. Solving the second meant going further than a flat photo editor — using AR scene understanding to actually read the room a photo was being placed into, in real time, through the camera.
Building it on-device, on purpose
Early on we made a deliberate choice: Hey Twin would process photos locally on the device whenever possible, rather than uploading them to a server. Partly for speed — there’s no upload-wait-download loop. But mostly because these are often deeply personal photos, and we didn’t want “send grandma’s photo to the cloud” to be a requirement just to use the app.
Where we are now
Hey Twin launched in January 2026 as a small team’s answer to one missing chair at one dinner table. Since then, the thing that’s stuck with us most isn’t the technology — it’s the messages from people who’ve used it for their own version of that same moment: a friend overseas, a parent who couldn’t travel, a version of themselves from twenty years ago.
If you’ve got a memory like that, we built this for you. Read more about how it works on our How It Works page, or just download the app and try it tonight.