Meet Prismm, a startup that helps banks keep families’ money in-house after an account holder dies. It does this by building beneficiary and estate planning into accounts from day one, which makes the transfer of assets to heirs less complicated. Prismm is presenting its mission today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.

Prismm was founded in 2020 by sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla, who each have decades of experience in banking and finance. The pair came up with the idea for Prismm based on their own experience of seeing firsthand how difficult it can be to manage a family’s affairs in an emergency.

Their father was hospitalized in 2017 after he fell while helping clear a tree from a neighbor’s roof following Hurricane Irma in Miami. Their mother, who had always relied on him to handle the family’s finances and paperwork, didn’t know where all the important documents and financial information were, and neither did they. Their father recovered, but the experience of not knowing how to access critical information stuck with them.

That was the starting point for Prismm, but the idea really took shape three years later, when Underwood was working at a bank during the COVID-19 pandemic. She saw families come in after a loved one had died, scrambling to find accounts, understand bills, and figure out how to support the surviving spouse.

“That’s when it hit us that this is an infrastructure problem, and as I started to dig deeper, we’ve created all of these platforms for wealth growth and tracking, but almost nothing for transition,” Underwood said in an interview with TechCrunch.

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