Bereave wants employers to suck a little less at navigating death | TechCrunch

If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies so prepared for taxes, but not for death?

“I lost both of my parents in college, and I wasn’t initially interested in starting a business based on that experience,” he said. To deprive Co-founder Elijah Linder.

Starting the company so soon after Linder’s loss was a long process. But in 2020, when co-founder Matt Tyner’s mother died, the two of them got the idea to create something that could make their experiences a little less terrible.

“I had the entrepreneurial bug — I waited until I saw a problem and a mission worth pursuing,” Linder said.

Together with CEO Justin Clifford, the Indianapolis-based team conducted a series of interviews with people experiencing loss to find out where they could make the most impact.

“In these conversations, people would say, ‘Here’s who we lost, here’s when we lost them.’ And then they’d say, ‘Here’s what my manager did,’” Clifford told TechCrunch. “And it was like, ‘Wait a minute, why are you talking about your manager right now?’”

It became clear to Beriev that people were struggling to deal with grief in the workplace. So Beriev created a B2B product to sell to employers, which they can offer to their employees in times of need. The platform lists resources for people experiencing loss, guiding them through the steps to close a loved one’s affairs. So far, the company has about 12 clients who pay an annual fee based on their number of employees — a company with 100 employees will pay $1,000 per year, while a company with 1,000 employees will pay $5,500.

“Most of the death tech companies that are going into B2B are very niche — like, they’re doing consulting, or they’re maybe focused on one or two pieces of the puzzle,” Clifford said. “What we’re trying to do is bring everything together to make sure there’s one source for businesses.”

The mental burden of grief when someone dies is compounded by the fact that there is a lot of work to do after a death – the deceased’s surviving relatives have to pay taxes, cancel insurance, make credit card and bank account transfers, create a will, and more.

“The whole idea is that you don’t necessarily have to think. You have a whole checklist in front of you,” Clifford said.

In times of crisis, these types of checklists are invaluable, which is why this model exists in other HR products as well. Tall PoppyA company that provides Digital security guidance For employees dealing with online harassment and hacking, it also uses a step-by-step checklist.

Employers often don’t have much support in this area, other than providing a few days off during bereavement and perhaps a few counseling sessions. So, on the employer side, Bereave provides resources that explain how to support an employee through a loss, or what to do when an employee passes away. These resources are helpful for team members as well, including modules that explain how to talk about loss in a sensitive way, or even what kind of food to serve to a grieving family.

“You’re planning for everything else in the business. What if someone goes on maternity leave, or some other kind of FMLA?” Clifford said. “There are certain things that are planned for, and this is not one of them.”

The decision to build software to sell to employers is a smart one. HR departments are more likely to seek out and pay for these kinds of resources than individual people, and as Beriev’s founders learned in their research, the funeral industry has been a bit slow to adapt to these kinds of offerings. But it will take time for Beriev to become the service it aspires to be.

“We’re in the process of raising funds right now to turn this system into enterprise-grade software and talk about automation for HR people and managers,” Clifford said. “So when these things happen, HR, teammates and managers can just implement it. They don’t have to think about what to do.”