While an inevitable fact of life, death is a difficult thing to talk about. It’s also extraordinarily burdensome to the folks who have lost a loved one, both emotionally and logistically. In the weeks and months following death, people can spend hundreds of hours arranging a funeral, validating a will, handling the decedent’s financials and cleaning out their property.
Here to provide some technological support to this notoriously tech-averse industry is Empathy, which launched out of stealth mode on Tuesday following a $13 million seed round co-led by General Catalyst and Aleph. The company is headquartered in Israel and is now hiring for various tech roles at its NYC office too.
Empathy co-founder and CEO Ron Gura says tech’s hesitation to tackle the logistics of death is largely due to the “inherent optimism of human nature.” However, the lack of innovation thus far has led to “missed opportunities” to help grieving families, leaving them “overwhelmed and underserved.”
“Logistics are made hard by grief, and grief is made harder by logistics,” Gura said in a statement. “Software can and will play a huge role in helping families deal with loss and will hopefully drive a much needed change in the industry at large.”
Empathy does this by serving as a “digital companion” for bereaved families, streamlining the end-of-life bureaucracy and automating the processes involved with handling a loved one’s affairs after they die. Users simply fill in a few details about their particular circumstance, and the platform guides them through a personalized, step-by-step process of everything they need to take care of — from funeral arrangements and invitations, to dealing with the will and organizing bereavement counseling for themselves.
The software is coupled with human support as well, providing users with both emotional and practical assistance that is designed to be helpful and, yes, empathetic.
“The end-of-life industry is a large sector that has been untouched by the wave of digital transformation occurring in every other industry,” Joel Cutler, co-founder and managing director at General Catalyst, said in a statement. “Empathy is unique in that it addresses both the emotional and logistical anguish of loss. We believe this is the technology and experience that can greatly benefit every family.”
While it’s true that death has been largely avoided by tech, there is a slowly growing cluster of startups beginning to take off in this arena. There’s NYC-based Lantern, a startup that aims to initiate the conversation around death between loved ones; and EOL, a platform that helps people plan their own death. Recompose, a Seattle startup that wants to compost human remains, raised nearly $5 million about a year ago.
“We’re going to see a complete explosion in this space in the next three, five, 10 years,” EOL founder Michael Hebb told Built In when the site launched last September, claiming we will likely double the number of people who die in a year in the coming decades due to the aging Baby Boomer population. “I think we’re at the very beginning of an exponential curve.”
As for Empathy, Aleph co-founder and equal partner Michael Eisenberg thinks the company’s model is ideal for the logistical side, improving how we “handle the burdens that come with death.”
“When grieving, many families do not have the bandwidth to deal with tasks and bureaucracy,” Eisenberg said in a statement. “By combining financial technology and emotional understanding, Empathy has built a product for the next-of-kin with compassion at its core.”
