KOCHI: There are some things we never throw away. A faded letter in familiar handwriting, an old postcard, a birthday card whose colours have begun to fade, or even the wrapper of a gift from someone we loved. They may look insignificant to others, but for us, they can hold an entire relationship. Touching them can bring back a voice, a face, a moment — sometimes even the feeling of having that person beside us.
But in an age when most of our conversations arrive as messages on a phone, such keepsakes are slowly disappearing. Entrepreneur Bivin A Peter wants to bring some of that magic back — in digital form.
Petra, which describes itself as the world’s first ‘keepsake messaging’ platform, is built around a simple question: what if the messages that matter most were designed to be kept?
“I’m someone who has always liked letters and postcards. I have this habit of carefully preserving whatever people send me. But nowadays, hardly anyone sends letters, and in the digital space, we don’t really have an option to send letters in that sense,” says Bivin, who hails from Palakkad.
Petra is not trying to replace instant messaging platforms. Instead, it seeks to recreate something digital communication has gradually lost — the keepsake.
The platform recreates the visual and emotional character of physical correspondence. A ‘Postcard’ — a feature in the webapp — can combine photographs, voice notes, handwriting, stamps and signatures, and can even be scheduled for delivery on a future date. Similarly , ‘Letter’ offers more space for longer messages and stories.
According to Bivin, the sense of beauty and permanence of ‘messages’ disappeared with the shift to digital communication.
A keepsake platform for messages that are worth cherishing forever
“A letter or a postcard had a certain beauty to it. There was also a sense of preservability, something we would keep, and then, after many years, take it out and look at it,” the 35-year-old copywriter says.
The idea became particularly personal after the death of his grandfather, T Johnson (Thambichayan), to whom Bivin was very close. Bivin has dedicated Petra to his memory. “My grandfather was a storyteller; he used to tell me so many stories. But when he suddenly died, it felt as though all those things had disappeared. They existed only in my memory,” Bivin recalls. “At that time, I really wished I had something personal that he had sent me — something handwritten, along with his voice, something like that,” he says.
That thought eventually became Petra, which Bivin began developing around 2023.
A key feature of the platform is ‘Groupsake’, where several people can contribute to a single keepsake — useful for birthdays, weddings, farewells or other milestones. A private Diary allows users to preserve thoughts, photographs and voice notes, while ‘Important Dates’ provides reminders for birthdays and anniversaries.
The ‘Your Handwriting’ feature goes a step further. Users can write something on paper, photograph it and have their handwriting incorporated into a digital postcard or letter.
Every keepsake is stored in the recipient’s ‘Album’, allowing it to be revisited years later. Petra’s philosophy is simple: a message worth sending today should be worth finding again a decade from now.
Privacy is built into the concept too. A keepsake can be protected with a passcode, while the message is encrypted in the sender’s browser before reaching Petra’s servers.
Using Petra is deliberately simple: choose a Postcard or Letter, add photographs, handwriting, stamps, signatures or voice, personalise it and send or schedule it. The keepsake then remains available in the Album instead of being buried in a chat stream.
In a world of disappearing messages, Petra is betting that some words still deserve to stay.