We started building Ginkgo because of a drill.
Not anything dramatic. Just an ordinary cordless drill that lived in different places depending on who used it last. Sometimes the under-stairs cupboard. Sometimes the garage shelf. Sometimes, inexplicably, the kitchen. If you needed it in a hurry, you were spending ten minutes looking. If you needed it and someone else had used it last, you were asking around. A lot.
A drill seems like a small thing. But multiply it by every tool, every charger, every cable, every piece of sporting equipment, every rarely-used appliance, every seasonal decoration, and every miscellaneous item that finds its way into the back of a drawer, and you have a significant, low-grade friction that runs through daily life.
We couldn’t find an app that solved this well. So we built one.
What Ginkgo does
Ginkgo is an app that remembers where things live in your home.
You tell it once, or take a photo, and it stores the location. When you need to find something, you ask. When something moves, you update it. When someone else in your household needs to find the same thing, they can ask too.
That is the simple version. The slightly more complete version is that Ginkgo uses AI to make the storing and searching as frictionless as possible. You can describe something in plain language, such as “the thing we use to bleed the radiators”, and Ginkgo will understand what you mean and tell you where it is. You can add items with a photo and a voice note. You can organise things into locations and projects without needing a rigid taxonomy.
The problem with remembering everything yourself
Most homes run on informal memory. One person knows where the spare batteries are. Someone else remembers which box has the Christmas lights. A third person knows where the appliance manuals went after the move.
That works until the person with the memory is busy, out of the house, or unsure because the item moved. Then the whole household has to search, message, ask or guess.
Ginkgo is designed to turn that private knowledge into shared household knowledge. Not in a heavy or bureaucratic way. More like giving the home a calm, searchable memory.
Why we care about this
There’s a version of this product that’s purely practical: a database of your possessions with a nice interface. That’s useful. But it’s not quite what we’re aiming for.
What we’re really building is a tool for cognitive calm.
The low-grade mental load of tracking where everything is, remembering what you have, and coordinating that knowledge across a household is invisible until it disappears. When it disappears, something else takes its place: a kind of quiet. A sense that your home is working with you rather than requiring constant management.
That might sound like a large claim for a home organisation app. But we genuinely believe that small reductions in daily friction compound over time into something meaningful. Less time looking for things. Less frustration. Fewer half-shouted questions across the house. More mental space for the things that actually matter.
Who we’re building for
Ginkgo is for anyone who shares a home with other people. Families with children. Couples. Housemates. Multigenerational households where everyone has different mental models of where things belong.
It is especially useful for people who move between spaces, including rented homes, holiday lets and properties managed for others, where the map of where things live needs to be explicit rather than assumed.
And it is for people who have tried other organisation systems and found them too rigid, too labour-intensive, or too easy to fall away from. Ginkgo is designed to be genuinely low-maintenance: it should take more effort to not use it than to use it.
What’s coming
We are launching a waitlist now. The app is in active development and we are using it ourselves every day, which means it is getting better every week.
When we launch, the core experience will be: add items, find items, share with your household. Over time, we want to add more, including smarter suggestions, better photo recognition and integrations that make the data go further. But we are starting with the thing that actually matters: making it easy to remember where things live.
If that sounds useful to you, join the waitlist. We’ll be in touch.
The Ginkgo team
Frequently asked questions
What is Ginkgo?
Ginkgo is a home organisation app that helps you remember where things live. You can add items, record their location, search in plain language and share the information with your household.
Who is Ginkgo for?
Ginkgo is for families, couples, housemates, landlords, letting agents and anyone who wants a simple way to find things at home or across properties.
How is Ginkgo different from a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet needs structure and manual upkeep. Ginkgo is designed around photos, plain language, household sharing and fast search, so it fits the way people actually remember things.