SAGE Snapshot

Fall 2026

At a glance for investors

• Problem: anxiety and disconnection have risen for decades, and young Americans have grown far more likely to feel their lives are controlled from outside them (Twenge, Zhang and Im, 2004).
• Solution: one daily habit, inside-out language, coached by AI in the words people already use.
• Sector: consumer digital health and wellness, non-clinical.
• Category: AI coaching app.
• Public-market analog: Consumer Discretionary, Diversified Consumer Services, the category that includes Duolingo.
• Business model: consumer subscription at about $29 a month, above Calm ($14.99) for direct, personal guidance, plus practitioner and institutional channels.
• Stage: pre-seed. The SAGE Companion and Translator are working in beta.
• Round: $250,000 on a post-money SAFE, $1.65 million valuation cap, closing November 1, 2026.
• Distribution: endorsement and adoption by experts, practitioners and the institutions they represent.
• Founders and ownership: Kevin Miller 50%, Jake and Hannah Eagle 50%. Team detail is in The Case for Investing in SAGE.
• Comparables: ABOVE, Bee (acquired by Amazon), Limitless (acquired by Meta), Nirva, and Purpose (co-founded by Mark Manson).
• Difference: other apps show how people come across or offer general coaching. SAGE finds where people place the cause of their experience in their own words and coaches them in inside-out language.

SAGE is a linguistic practice that changes how people experience life by changing how they think and speak about it. Outside-in language sounds like "He made me angry." Inside-out language sounds like "I'm angering myself because of how I'm perceiving him." Outside-in language also states a perception as fact: "The meeting was a total waste of time." Inside-out language owns the perception: "I didn't find value in the meeting." We call this the ownership mindset: owning the meaning you make of what happens to you. We weigh SAGE's three results equally: inner agency, deep connection and self-awareness.

Most self-help gives people a long list of things to do. SAGE asks for one keystone habit, Charles Duhigg's term for a single habit that sets off other changes without separate effort. Our keystone habit is translating your words into inside-out language. Our users report that it opens the door to a cascade of increased inner agency, deep connection, and self-awareness. Self-awareness here means seeing the meaning you're making while you make it.

Many people work on the mind through books, courses and therapy. We intend to change how people experience life at the scale of a culture, the way mindfulness did. We'll do it by putting the practice into the language people already use all day. We believe the mental health and well-being crisis is in large part an epidemic of disempowerment: people losing authorship of how they experience their lives. SAGE is how they can regain that agency.

Most people come to SAGE looking for connection, so our promise to them leads with connection. Within that promise, we're choosing a specific way in. SAGE offers people a great deal, but the most tangible and common need they feel is connection, with themselves and with others, and their most pressing interest is relational conflict. We intend to offer people what they want, as the way to give them what they need. Much of everyday conversation is people sharing their perspectives, and a good share of it is frustration with others who see things differently. That's the moment a SAGE user can offer something that helps a friend and makes them look good, what researchers call social currency. So our likely entry point is a contrarian one: conflict prevention. Most experts treat conflict as inevitable and teach people to fight better. In our experience, inside-out language invites curiosity, so much of the disagreement shrinks, and what remains tends to stay harmonious. Making SAGE work is half our job. The other half is getting people to want it, try it and keep using it, and we draw on behavioral science, the research on why people take up a new habit and stick with it, for that half. The Age of Ownership and The SAGE Phenomenon explain the why. This page covers the business: what's in place today, what this round funds, what comes after it, and how you can take part.

Where SAGE is today

SAGE has been practiced for fifty years, first by John and Joyce Weir and then by Jake and Hannah Eagle, with thousands of participants. Almost none of it was documented. It spread person to person, and today an informal network of people uses it in daily life. Many people are now using the SAGE Companion and Translator in beta, built with our own time and money, and most called SAGE a breakthrough without being prompted. What SAGE doesn't have yet is formal data. This round turns that informal network into a product people can buy, and produces SAGE's first paying members, usage data and pilot results.

• Beta users and long-time practitioners describe a result we didn't set out to design: a steady self-awareness of their own meaning-making as it happens.
• The William Glasser Institute has asked us to train its trainers across seventeen countries. The institute is the home of William Glasser's Choice Theory and Reality Therapy, approaches built on the idea that we choose our own behavior.
• Stephen Porges, originator of Polyvagal Theory, has called SAGE's language "truly polyvagal in its implications." Polyvagal Theory describes how the nervous system reads safety and threat, so his comment ties the language to the body.
• James Pennebaker, a pioneer in the psychology of language, suggested pairing language measures with heart rate variability to validate SAGE.
• Kevin continues to consult with Harvard's Bill Ury on the implications of SAGE.
• Jake Eagle is writing a book to help bring SAGE to a wider audience.
• We're in discussion with PhD candidates at UC Berkeley to facilitate a formal pilot.
• We're in ongoing conversation with technology partners about the finished SAGE product. They include Aligned, the software studio led by Jonatan Littke that built the technology behind the AI wearable ABOVE. We see Aligned as a strong candidate for the seed round, either as a vendor we hire or as an equity partner.

How SAGE will reach people

Bestselling author Mark Manson co-founded Purpose, an AI mentor app, in 2025. Its growth centers on his audience, as his title, Chief Growth Officer, suggests. SAGE's reach rests on the credibility of many. Over more than a decade of podcast interviews, Kevin has built relationships with leading psychologists, neuroscientists and negotiators, including professors at Harvard, Stanford and Georgetown, and with the institutions they represent. Several are already engaged with SAGE, as listed above. We intend to pair that credibility with formal research, beginning with our pilot. As SAGE grows, we intend to bring in public figures whose audiences reach millions.

How people will use SAGE

• Phase one, this round: within a browser, people can speak, type or paste in what they're thinking through. The SAGE Companion guides them in the ownership mindset and inside-out language.
• The SAGE Translator works like Grammarly for ownership. You paste in something you've written. The Translator shows you where you gave ownership away and rewrites your words inside-out.
• Phase two, after the seed round: a daily SAGE app. It also gathers people's communications from the apps they choose to connect and from an optional wearable device. It gives them overviews, scores and guidance on how much ownership shows up in how they communicate. The Age of Ownership describes that finished product, where we're heading, and the significant implications we see for mental health and well-being in this age.

The product closest to what SAGE is building is ABOVE, an AI wearable that analyzes tone, pace and how people come across. It began shipping its first units in 2025 and hasn't published user numbers yet. We see it as early evidence of a category forming. ABOVE shows people how they come across. SAGE adds a method they can act on.

This round: pre-seed, phase one

We're raising $250,000 now to complete phase one over the next ten months. Until now, SAGE has lived almost entirely in personal contact, one conversation and one invitation at a time. Our website offers little, and there's nothing people can easily join or share. This round is what makes SAGE exist publicly, in this order:

1. Take the SAGE Companion and Translator from beta to a full subscription product, ready for individual memberships. The product will have the privacy and memory to track a person's growth over time. Programming begins immediately.
2. At the same time, build SAGE's public presence: the initial brand, a fully functioning website and social media. The Companion, the Translator and supporting content will be available for people to join, use and share.
3. Soft open SAGE to the public and begin earning revenue.
4. Put the product in the hands of the William Glasser Institute's trainers and the participants in our pilot.
5. Conduct the pilot study, SAGE's first formal validation.
6. Begin applying for grant funding for deeper research through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Tax-deductible donations and grants through the sponsor fund further research and grant writing, with results shared publicly.

The round also funds the people doing this work: Kevin Miller, Jake and Hannah Eagle, and a part-time project manager/COO.

By the end of phase one, SAGE will be a working product with paying members, an initial public brand, an institutional partner and pilot results. Those results give the seed round a real basis for valuation.

What comes next: the seed round

At the end of phase one, we intend to raise a priced seed round. That's the point at which SAGE is formally valued. We're working toward a valuation near $10 million. The seed round funds phase two and beyond.

For the seed round, Kevin has direct connections to venture funds whose focus matches SAGE's. Among them are Next Ventures, which backs whole-person health and is an investor in Oura, and Wisdom Ventures, which invests in technology for well-being and human connection. We intend to bring SAGE to them, and to others, once phase one is complete.

Seed round initiatives:

• Combining the Companion and Translator into one comprehensive SAGE app.
• Validating the Ownership and Connection Scores against established measures of agency and well-being, as described in The Age of Ownership.
• Connecting the app to the channels people already use, such as text, email and messaging apps, and to health data from wearables.
• An optional SAGE wearable for passive, all-day use, white-labeled from an existing device maker rather than built from scratch.
• Membership in a SAGE community for everyone who subscribes.
• A network of SAGE practitioners to walk with people as ownership reorients their lives.
• Marketing and distribution partnerships to take SAGE to scale.

We anticipate long-term subscribers for two reasons. First, the wearables and health apps people keep paying for suggest that a subscription lasts when it tells people something true about themselves. More than 80% of Oura members renew after their first year, and Oura is approaching five million paid members. Calm, a well-being app with no device at all, is reported to have more than four million paying subscribers. WHOOP, which includes its device in a membership, reports more than 2.5 million members and about $1.1 billion in annual revenue, and raised $575 million at a $10.1 billion valuation in March 2026. SAGE is built around a practice people use all day rather than merely a gadget. Second, people who go through a real change in how they experience life tend to want to keep practicing with others who live the same way. The SAGE community is for them.

What membership revenue could look like at the planned $29 a month:

These figures are a scale reference, not a forecast. They count app memberships only. They don't include practitioner training and licensing, courses, events and retreats, or books and other materials.

The terms

• Instrument: a post-money SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity), a standard early-stage agreement that converts to equity at the next priced round. It carries no interest, no debt and no maturity date.
• Valuation cap: $1.65 million post-money.
• Pro rata right: the right to invest more at the seed round to keep your ownership percentage.
• Governance: founders retain majority control, with no board seat attached to this round.

What a founding investment could become if the seed round is priced at a $10 million pre-money valuation:

At that seed price, each dollar invested now would be worth about six dollars. These figures are illustrative, not a guarantee. The seed round may be priced differently or may not happen. Ownership is shown before dilution from the seed round and later rounds, and the executed SAFE governs all terms.

This price is available only in this round, to our founding investors. The cap rewards people who commit before there's a finished product or pilot results. Anyone who waits and invests at the seed round will pay that round's price instead.

We intend to close this round by November 1, 2026, with five to ten investors. The pilot study and the William Glasser Institute's trainer program are ready to begin, and both depend on the subscription version of the Companion and Translator that this round funds.

The ask

I was on an adventure in Colorado with a group of friends. One of them was describing a real estate fund he leads that revitalizes small Colorado towns. As I listened, I realized I had no interest in investing in a fund for normal real estate. What I want to invest in is real estate of the mind. This effort is bigger than SAGE alone. It's an investment in the human experience, in helping people transform and evolve beyond mere knowledge. SAGE is the most promising initiative I've found for that work.

I'm asking you to become one of SAGE's founding investors. I don't think of the people who join at this stage as mere financial investors. You'd be among the first to back SAGE, with your belief and your money, before there's a finished product to point to. We want to build SAGE with you.

For collaboration and accountability, we'll keep an ongoing WhatsApp group for all of our founding investors. We'll also meet as a group by video at least once a month. You'll see the progress, weigh in and contribute however you're able, as each of us works to improve the human experience.

I'm glad to answer any questions and to walk you through the rest of the materials.

Kevin Miller · kevin@kevinmiller.co · 719-659-2435

Jake Eagle · jake@sageprocess.com · 808-854-0474