If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies prepared for taxes but not for death?
“I lost both my parents in college, which didn’t initially spark my interest in starting a business based on my experiences,” said Elijah Linder, co-founder of Bereave.
Establishing a company in the immediate aftermath of Linder's loss may not have been easy. But when co-founder Matt Tyner's mother passed away in 2020, the pair got the idea to create something that could make his experience much less terrifying.
“I had the entrepreneurial bug. I waited until I discovered a problem and a mission worth pursuing,” Linder said.
The Indianapolis-based team, along with CEO Justin Clifford, conducted a series of interviews with people experiencing loss to get a better idea of where they could make the biggest impact.
“In these conversations, people would say, 'Here's who we lost, and here's when we lost them.' And they say, ‘This is how my boss reacted.’” Clifford told TechCrunch. “And it was like, ‘Wait a minute, why are you talking about the manager?’”
It became clear to Bereave that people were struggling to navigate grief at work. So Bereave built a B2B product to sell to employers, who can then provide it to their employees when they need it. The platform has compiled a list of resources for people experiencing loss to guide them through the steps of finalizing their loved one's affairs. So far, the company has about a dozen customers who pay an annual fee based on the number of employees. A company with 100 employees would pay $1,000 per year, while a company with 1,000 employees would pay $5,500.
“Most death tech companies that go into B2B are very niche – they might do consulting, for example, or they might focus on one or two pieces of the puzzle,” Clifford said. “What we’re trying to do is bring everything together and make sure there’s a single source of truth for the business.”
There is so much to do when someone dies that the emotional pain of grief can be even more intense. The deceased's living relatives must handle taxes, insurance cancellation, credit card and bank transfers, wills, and more.
“The whole idea is that you don’t necessarily have to think,” Clifford said. “You have a whole checklist in front of you.”
In times of crisis, this kind of checklist is very important, which is why this model exists in other HR products. Tall Poppy, a company that provides digital safety guidance to employees dealing with online harassment and hacking, also uses a step-by-step checklist.
Other than offering a few days off for bereavement and offering counseling sessions, employers often don't offer much support in this area. So on the employer side, Bereave provides resources that explain how to support an employee's loss or what to do if an employee dies. These resources can also be helpful to team members, including modules that explain how to talk sensitively about loss or what types of food to provide to grieving families.
“You’re planning everything else in your business. What happens if someone takes maternity leave or some other type of FMLA?” Clifford said. “Things happen that are planned, and this is not one of them.”
The decision to build software to sell to employers is smart. HR departments are more likely than individuals to seek out and pay for these kinds of resources, and as Bereave's founders learned in their research, the funeral industry is a bit slow to adapt to services like this. But it will take time for Bereave to grow into the service it wants to be.
“We’re in the process of raising funds right now to transform this system into enterprise-grade software and talk about automation for HR people and managers,” Clifford said. “So when something like this happens, HR, team members and managers can jump into action. They don’t have to think about what to do.”
