Imagine it is the year 2300. Your body has been cryopreserved at the European Biostasis Foundation's storage facility for more than two centuries. Revival is no longer science fiction: breakthroughs in nanotechnology have given the field the investment it needed, most diseases are curable, and various revival technologies are in testing. You are close. Then a disastrous economic crisis pushes Tomorrow.bio, the Berlin company that cryopreserved you in the first place, into bankruptcy. If you could feel anything, this would alarm you. So here is the question that actually matters, asked plainly: when the company that sold you the promise dies, do you warm up with it? Or did its founders, two decades earlier, build something that does not depend on the company surviving?
We think this is exactly the question a careful person should ask, and we would rather answer it than reassure you. A provider that cannot survive your inquiry into its own failure does not deserve your trust.
Yes, we planned for our own bankruptcy
The short answer is yes. Dr. Emil Kendziorra and Fernando Azevedo Pinheiro, the founders of Tomorrow.bio, designed for a future shutdown from the start. When your product is measured in centuries, long-term thinking is not a virtue, it is the job. You can love your company and pour everything into making it succeed and still admit you cannot predict the next 200 years. An economic crisis, a war, or internal collapse could end any company.
Sooner or later it ends most of them. A few last centuries. A millennium is brutally rare: the longest-lived company on record, the Japanese construction firm Kongo Gumi, opened in 578 CE. We study that kind of longevity seriously, as in building organizations meant to last, but studying it is not the same as betting your patients' existence on beating the odds. When you are responsible for someone in biostasis, you solve the problem before it arrives, even if it never does. Our solution is structural, and its name is EBF.
The company can move fast because the patient does not depend on it
The reason bankruptcy is survivable is that the two halves of the work were deliberately pried apart, which is the core of the Tomorrow.bio ecosystem. Tomorrow.bio handles the day-to-day work that needs a flexible, adaptable spirit: member care, marketing, and above all the cryopreservation procedure itself.
The European Biostasis Foundation handles the work that needs the opposite temperament, stability and security. EBF is a non-profit based in Switzerland, devoted to biostasis research and the indefinite storage and possible future revival of patients. Switzerland is among the most economically and socially stable countries in the world, and its foundation law ensures EBF stays locked to its mission. Funds for your preservation are not parked inside the operating company either, they sit with a dedicated patient-care foundation whose only job is to protect them. So the entity that could go bankrupt is not the entity that holds you, and not the entity that holds your money. That is not an accident. It is the entire design.
So what actually happens to you?
Return to 2300. Tomorrow.bio, for whatever reason, closes its doors. What becomes of you?
The honest answer is anticlimactic, which is the point: nothing changes for you. You remain cryopreserved until technology can repair the cause of your legal death and revive you. Once you are in EBF's hands, your preservation does not ride on the survival of the company that performed it. The whole architecture exists so that the sentence "the provider failed" never completes itself with "so the patients were lost."
There is one real exception, and we will not pretend otherwise. Picture your great-grandson, signed up with Tomorrow.bio and still alive when the company folds. Obviously a closed company cannot cryopreserve him when his time comes. So he gets a choice: terminate his contract, or transfer it to another provider, and by then there may well be several to choose from across Europe. Because bankruptcy does not happen overnight, every living member would be told well in advance, and we would do everything possible to ensure that those who want to be cryopreserved still can be, whether with us or with someone else. The already-preserved are safe regardless. The not-yet-preserved keep their options.
The company you sign with can fail. Your preservation was deliberately built so that it does not fail with it.
This is why we keep saying the hardest problem in cryonics is not the science of the cold, it is the governance of the centuries. The cold is the easy part, physics holds -196°C for free. The hard part is making sure an institution is still standing, still funded, and still aligned with your interests long after everyone who founded it is gone. We answered it the only way we trust: not with a promise to never fail, but with a structure where our failure cannot reach you.