Earlier this week we wrote about what startups are doing to help us live longer.
No matter how much we extend our lives, we won’t last without end. And that brings us to the next topic of startup financing: Innovation and investment around death and end-of-life planning.
Partly this was an excuse to reuse the above graphic, which had been largely dormant since we last wrote about the subject 4 years ago. Plus, there’s quite a little bit of funding for this macabre subject.
In areas from green burials to wills and estate planning, startups have attracted a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands in death-related business models. Using Crunchbase dataWe have prepared a list of 20 such firms that have obtained financing in recent years.
The most vital topics of financing
There are a few firms on the list that fit best into their very own category. One of them is Santa Fe, New Mexico The Stone of Separationwhich turns the ashes of family members into stays that seem like smooth stones. The former “Shark Tank” competitor has raised greater than $4 million to date.
Others fit more easily into broader themes. Several categories we identified include environmentally friendly burial and inhumation practices, digital tools to facilitate estate planning, and offerings to streamline funeral planning.
In the area of green burials, the largest beneficiary of funding to date is the city of San Francisco Better foreststhat enables people to scatter ashes under a memorial tree in a protected forest. The company has raised nearly $80 million in known funding to date and currently operates 10 dedicated forests.
The Better Place expansion comes amid a rise in cremation. In the U.S., for example, about 61% of bodies are cremated, according to National Funeral Directors Associationwhile about 35% are buried. The group predicts that by 2045, 80% will likely be cremated.
For those looking for a more carbon-neutral alternative to cremation or burial, a Seattle-based startup Earth raised $10 million to offer a process that it says will “gently transform the body into nutrient-rich soil.” Families select how much soil they need to return to spread or plant, and the rest is donated to local conservation projects.
In a similar vein, Back homeone other Washington startup, has raised $2 million to offer a process it calls terramation, or human composting. The company advocates for legalizing the process nationwide. (It’s currently legal in several states.)
For those looking for a simpler approach to cremation, Po.com has raised over $20 million, including $10 million in July Series Aan online platform that enables you to organize cremations and other post-mortem services as a substitute of using the services of a traditional funeral home.
Estate planning
Much of the funding around death is also focused on fintech and legaltech. In particular, financial and legal tools for end-of-life planning have recently attracted significant investment.
This is not too surprising. With an aging population and an unprecedented transfer of wealth from one generation to the next in the U.S. and other countries, there is a greater need for services that organize our funds and inheritance plans, according to Wealth.comone of the higher financed startups in the industry.
Phoenix-based Wealth.com announced last week that it had raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Google Projects to “modernize and simplify estate planning.” The two-year-old company sells its AI-enabled platform to financial advisors, who can use it to create wills and estate documents.
Based in San Diego Trust and will has raised greater than $48 million to date for a barely more do-it-yourself approach to estate planning. Clients pay a fee to use the software to create an estate plan based on a will or trust.
An enormous, slowly growing market
Looking ahead, we are able to expect that many startups will have difficulty breaking into a traditional sector akin to the funeral industry, which is not known for its speed of adapting to change.
However, even the most traditional industries have to sustain with the times. Even the NFDA supports the concept, hosting an annual Innovation Award(This 12 months’s finalists included a software platform for funeral homes, an app for managing family mementos and technology that lets families control the visibility inside a coffin.)
Meanwhile, startups may have the advantage of creating processes easier for tasks that folks do not like but that everybody will have to deal with anyway.