A look at startups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to online forums for grieving virtually, amid a surge in interest during the pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has drawn new business to start-ups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to a final tweet. Tweets: @codybarbo , @nytimesbusiness , @followlantern , @danimarom , @ykomska , and @erinbury Tweets: Cody Barbo / @codybarbo : Thanks to @propjen of the @nytimes for bringing up an uncomfortable but necessary conversation around end-of-life planning. We're proud of the work we're doing at @trustandwill to make estate planning simple, affordable, & accessible for millions of Americans https://twitter.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Before the pandemic, selling death to people in their 20s and 30s wasn't easy. Since Covid-19, this has changed. Now end-of-life start-ups — companies that help clients plan funerals, dispose of remains and process grief — have experienced growth. https://www.nytimes.com/... Lantern / @followlantern : “...all of these founders share a mission: to democratize end-of-life planning and care.” Amazing piece on the incredible work of our friends and colleagues working to support people through some of life's darkest moments in @nytimes today. https://www.nytimes.com/... Dani Marom / @danimarom : Cute, low-key mention of my Instagram Live series in @nytimes — so excited for what's to come for @Eterneva & our amazing DeathCo friends! @newnarrativeYVR @LifeWeb360 @FollowLantern @joincakeapp @trustandwill #griefwellness #deathpositive https://www.nytimes.com/... Yuliya Komska / @ykomska : Not the point of the article, but apparently Stanford Business School students routinely practice writing their obituaries. Legacy legacy legacy. https://www.nytimes.com/... Erin Bury / @erinbury : “Since Covid-19...Millennials are newly anxious about their mortality, increasingly comfortable talking about it and more likely to be grieving or know someone who is.” Great article feat. our friends at @trustandwill! (Also I'm a member of the Death & Co. Slack channel!) https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This New York Times survey lands at the intersection of two arcs the coverage has been tracking: the pre-pandemic rise of US funeral livestreaming, where an estimated 20% of funeral homes already offered the service (a shift Wired documented in 2019), and COVID-19's sudden acceleration of it once gatherings became unsafe (livestreamed funerals and ancestor ceremonies spiked within weeks of the outbreak).
The article widens that lens from funerals to the whole end-of-life stack — estate planning via Trust & Will, virtual grieving forums, even a "final tweet" — with founder Cody Barbo framing it as making planning "simple, affordable & accessible" for millions of Americans. The through-line: mortality tech was a stagnant industry until the pandemic forced adoption, and startups are claiming each layer of it.
First-order effects
- Trust & Will and peers gain mainstream visibility and new customers as pandemic anxiety converts millennials — per the reporting, newly anxious about mortality — into estate-planning buyers who might otherwise never have engaged.
- Funeral homes that had already invested in livestreaming capability now face software startups competing for the adjacent moments: planning before death and grieving after it.
Second-order effects
- Demand for digital memorialization spills beyond US startups into organic communities like the Brazilian "PGM" Facebook groups, where 160,000+ members collect and memorialize accounts of the deceased (a phenomenon Rest of World profiled) — evidence the grief layer scales without any company building it, pressuring paid products to differentiate.
- Legacy-preservation startups selling interactive memorial bots and avatars (the Washington Post's 2019 look at "digital immortality" offerings) become the natural next purchase after estate documents and virtual memorials, pulling the same customers deeper into subscription-style relationships with their own data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, death care consolidates around consumer-software platforms the way other stagnant industries did — with startups owning the customer relationship that funeral homes and paper-based planners used to hold, and regulators eventually forced to define ownership of posthumous accounts.
- The boom coexists uneasily with Silicon Valley's opposite bet on defeating death itself — billionaires pledging millions to longevity firms (Bloomberg's accounting of the Bezos-Altman-Page longevity pledges) — leaving the industry serving both those preparing for death and those funding its postponement.
The trend: End-of-life services are migrating from funeral homes and legal paperwork to consumer software startups, with the pandemic converting a taboo into a growth category spanning planning, grieving, and digital legacy.