Death, like the says the famous saying, is one of life’s inevitable certainties. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with – not least because while loved ones are grieving, they also have to handle a dizzying number of practical tasks, from arranging funerals to arranging finances for the deceased. Call a startup Empathy has built a platform to help navigate this difficult space, and now with approximately 40 million people using the platform, has raised $47 million in additional funding to grow.
The equity round, a Series B, is led by new backer Index Ventures with several major insurance companies — MassMutual Ventures, MetLife, New York Life, Securian and Sumitomo — participating as strategic investors. While the company originally started with a more direct sales model, these days, it operates primarily through a B2B2C approach, providing services through policies from employers or insurers, which together account for 99% of its business.
The funding will be used to continue developing its tools and focus on a larger mission of “redefining bereavement care,” in the words of CEO Ron Gura, who co-founded the company with Yonatan Bergman.
Today, Empathy’s platform incorporates a mix of AI and human guides to help people with all different aspects of the grieving process, from counseling services and AI to help write obituaries to services to help automate the bereavement process running all the dozens of cloud services the deceased could have used, as well as handling more complex financial affairs.
Further services will likely incorporate more AI tools to guide people through the “what next” process of getting things organized, Gura said.
This round brings Empathy’s total raised to $90 million. Empathy does not disclose its valuation, but we understand from sources close to the company that it is now close to $400 million.
The startup was founded in Israel and continues to develop its R&D activities there, but its business focus to date has been the US market, where it sells services mainly through insurance companies and employers. To date, about 5 million workers and 35 million policyholders use Empathy’s tools, Gura said.
Empathy’s arrival in the market came at an opportune time: it launched in the US in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, when mortality was perhaps more on people’s minds than normal. and, as it turned out, a prime time in venture financing. This led the company to quickly announce two rounds in its launch year: first $13 million and then another $30 million just five months later.
While US death rates are now improving after the worst years of the Covid-19 pandemic, they will still exceed 3 million annually in 2023, according to data from the US Census. What hasn’t decreased are the hours it takes – more than 420 on average – to finish a decedent’s cases. Most people know nothing about what is going on in this endeavor until they are faced with it themselves (which unfortunately I can say I know from first hand experience is very true).
Gura—a serial entrepreneur who had founded a social commerce company that he sold on eBay (The Gifts Project), who then spent years in senior roles at WeWork—recounted a tragedy in his family and dealing with this very predicament managing practices his own emotional moments, is what made him think about Empathy in the first place.
“I knew nothing about estate planning, but I knew a lot about grief,” she said.
The rise of more sophisticated AI tools has played a role in how Empathy has evolved over the past two years. While there have been many attempts in the field to look at the role artificial intelligence can play in empathy (with a little “h”), startup Empathy, Gura said, remains focused on keeping a human team in place for this aspect of service, focusing technology rather than simply on making it easier to handle some of the busy and organizational tasks in faster and more efficient, scalable ways.
“For Empathy to provide this service as table bets for all life insurance policyholders, it would not have been possible without smart technology,” Index partner Danny Rimer said in an interview. “There are certain aspects that will be handled by humans, but certain tools need to be provided [alongside that]… Practical things like being able to close bank or subscription accounts. Artificial intelligence can provide much of this replicable logic. It can also be useful in writing eulogies.’
In addition to Index and the insurers, others in this round included previous backers General Catalyst, Entrée Capital, Latitude (a sister fund of existing investor LocalGlobe) and Brewer Lane.
