About Familiar

Familiar turns every screen into a digital picture frame connected to your family and friends. With Familiar, your best moments fill the screens of loved ones. It's simple: capture a moment and send it directly to the screen of your family. Your photos shows up instantly on the tablets, screensavers, or wallpapers of family and friends.

Familiar is all about family - making it easy to stay connected with loved ones all over the world. It helps you get your photos viewed by the people you care about most, connecting families separated by distance. It works with the photo services you already use today: Facebook, Instagram, iPhoto, Picasa and more. And it works across devices on computers, tablets or smartphones already in your home - Windows PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and Kindle Fire.

Your best memories were meant to be seen again and again. Let moments with family and friends fill your screens - a simple glance will brighten your day.

The Team

In 2011, Marcus Womack, Mike Bohlander, Ray Fortna and Josh Hepfer - all former colleagues at the successful social music service iLike - joined together to start Familiar. The idea for Familiar came about as Marcus, a dad with two young kids, sought to find a way to help his family view each others best memories. Together the team is focused on creating a service that helps families to effortlessly re-experience their best memories.

Marcus Womack - CEO

“Family photos are meant to be seen and should be brought out of recesses of our digital lockers. My goal with Familiar is to bring back the family photo onto our screens, into our living rooms, and back into our lives.”

Marcus brings to the company over 14 years of experience in product management, design, and development. Prior to Familiar, Marcus served as the Product Director (and later as VP/General Manager) at iLike, where he executed the business and product strategies. At iLike he coordinated partnerships and products for artists, events & ticketing, artist syndication, and more. iLike was acquired by MySpace in 2009. Prior to iLike, he worked at Microsoft in digital media and gaming on products including XBOX Live, Zune, and MSN Music. Marcus holds a BA from Pacific Lutheran University and lives Seattle with his wife and two kids, whose photos are often sent to family via Familiar.

Josh Hepfer - Designer

“My goal with Familiar is to get the technology out of the way and make it about the photos. Social sharing is so easily hampered with complex interface, and simply and privately viewing photos can be an unnecessarily cumbersome process.”

Josh brings to Familiar over 16 years of expertise in design and user experience. As one of the leaders and educators in his field, Josh’s work spans desktop, web and mobile software, with relevant experience in small business services, digital music, entertainment, social networks, and a large variety of platform and mobile products. 
Starting his career in helping businesses with Internet strategies, he went on to design user experiences at Onvia, a leading provider of Business-to-Government solutions, and at Microsoft, where he was responsible for user interface at MSN Music and entertainment sites. 
In 2006, Josh joined iLike as Creative Director and helped create the design that led to the successful sale of the site to MySpace. In addition to taking road trips, camping and fishing, Josh spends his free time mediating fights between his dog and cat and then taking photos of them to share through Familiar.

Mike Bohlander - Engineer

“Familiar has made it easy for my family to view our photos in one united place. It’s been great to see old family photos from my parents as well as share photos of our new baby.”

Before co-founding Familiar, Mike joined Facebook as part of the rel8tion acquisition and worked on the Facebook Ads API. Mike began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft, working on a variety of projects from cloud storage to Visual Studio. After Microsoft, Mike joined iLike as an early engineer where he helped scale and grow its Facebook application to over 50 million users. A graduate of Cornell University, Mike is a proud new dad to a baby girl. He and his wife share a lot of baby photos using Familiar.

Ray Fortna - Engineer

“As a new uncle, I love using Familiar to stay updated on my long distance nephew’s growth and development. It’s been a great tool for my entire family to engage with each other in real time, especially since we all live in different parts of the country.”

Ray Fortna is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 10 years industry experience. After studying Computer Science at University of Washington, Ray joined Avogadro in 2001. Avogadro was part of a 100 million dollar acquisition by Openwave Inc. In 2004, Ray was the first employee hired by Jobster, which grew to over 100 employees and 50 million dollars in investment. Later, at iLike, Ray implemented the concert features across iLike, and built the initial Facebook application that fueled iLike’s growth to over 50 million users. Additionally, Ray built the Local Concerts iPhone application that was featured in an apple commercial and was the most popular concert application on the iPhone. Next, Ray joined Urbanspoon where he was responsible for implementing the rezbook iPad application. Ray lives on a houseboat in Seattle and shares photos of his dog Dallas via Familiar.

Aakash Kambuj - Engineer

“Most of my family live in India, and Familiar has been an indispensible, free tool for helping us stay connected in real time. My family loves seeing all that I’m doing in America, and because it’s so easy to use, Familiar is helping them share more of their lives with me.”


Over his 11-year career at Microsoft, Aakash worked on a variety of projects across different service teams. As part of the SQL Server team, he helped with the rewrite for SQL Server 2005. While working on Live Mesh, Aakash was responsible for portions of the storage API, running all the cloud services powering Mesh. And at Xbox Live he led the User Profile & Social team, which was responsible for the Xbox user profile, game history, gamerscore, achievements, Facebook integration, roaming profiles and avatars. After graduating from the National University of Singapore in 2001, Aakash traveled across Australia & Asia before joining Microsoft as an engineer. Aakash loves to travel with his wife and exercise his skills as an amateur photographer. His photos, of course, are all shared with loved ones through Familiar.