When Sara Tashakorinia’s husband died in a car accident eight years ago, the last thing she needed was the roughly 570 hours of paperwork it takes, on average, to settle a loved one’s affairs. But for millions of people each year, this is their reality: a crushing loss, followed by a soullessly mundane avalanche of tedious administrative work.

“The day your loved one passes away, you also get this honorary badge of a project manager for a project you had no idea about, trying to navigate something and learn something when you literally have zero information,” Tashakorinia told TechCrunch.

After years of volunteering to help others navigate what she had to learn on her own, it occurred to Tashakorinia that AI might be able to help — not with the complex, messy experience of grieving and healing, but with the least human parts of the process, like finding the right tax forms, filing insurance claims, and shutting down bank accounts.

The result is LumenUs, the grief care platform that Tashakorinia founded last year to relieve grieving families of some of the administrative burden.

“I think going through it, your threshold of pain is so high, and you’re so lost that you don’t really realize, why do people treat you this way? Why was I left with a stack of paperwork, and why was the funeral home charging me a 300% markup on a casket?” Tashakorinia said.

While Tashakorinia hopes LumenUs will eventually support people throughout the lifelong grieving process, the startup will initially focus on people in the immediate aftermath of a death.

Source link