Indianapolis startup Bereave aims to improve funeral planning

Maybe you’ve heard of The Knot, the online marketplace where users can connect with vendors and plan their weddings. Indianapolis-based startup Bereave wants to do something similar—but for funerals.

And it’s on its way towards that goal. The company, which launched quietly in 2021, hired Demandwell and Lessonly alum Justin Clifford as its CEO earlier this year, and it’s working to raise nearly $1 million in a “friends and family” funding round that it expects to close this fall.

Currently, funeral directors can visit bereaveapp.com to order temporary grave markers and funeral signage. Over time, Bereave wants to expand the site into a place where users can connect with vendors and preplan funeral details, easing the burden on the loved ones they leave behind.

Bereave was founded by Eli Linder, Keagan McGuire and Matt Tyner. Linder lost both of his parents when he was in college, and Tyner’s mother died in 2020. McGuire’s father owns The Innovative Marketing Group, which provides temporary granite grave markers.

It was in grieving together and sharing their experiences that the friends came up with the idea of a business that could improve the funeral-planning process.

“This is a company that can impact everybody, and that is a really, really unique situation,” Clifford said. “That seems like a really great mission-driven opportunity that can create a great business.”

The company began generating revenue early last year selling Innovative Marketing Group’s grave markers to partner funeral homes, which then resell them to the families they serve.

Bereave promises three- to four-day delivery of the 6-inch-by-12-inch granite markers, which can be staked into the ground at the gravesite for the funeral and burial services and later taken home as a keepsake. The markers are meant as temporary stand-ins for permanent headstones, which can take between three and 18 months to be created and delivered to the grave site, Clifford said.

The temporary markers retail for $200, as compared with $3,000 and up for a permanent marker.

Currently, Bereave has about 100 partner funeral homes across the U.S. who can use Bereave’s website to order grave markers on their clients’ behalf. Those partners include a funeral home in Uvalde, Texas, which ordered some of the markers for victims of the 2022 mass shooting at a school in that town. Individuals can also order markers directly from Bereave’s website.

The current goal, Clifford said, is to expand Bereave’s grave marker business by adding additional product options and expanding the company’s network of funeral-home partners. “There are more than 30,000 funeral homes in the U.S., and we’ve got 100 of them as resellers—so we’ve got a lot to do there.”

Down the road, Bereave plans to add more vendors to its site, making the platform into a place where people can preplan the details of their funeral, down to things like the type of flowers, the readings and the color scheme they prefer. Funeral directors who are already working with clients who preplan their funeral arrangements could offer the site as an additional planning tool, Clifford said.

“The idea is to start [with the grave markers], start inside the experience of the consumer at the funeral home, generate revenue, generate data, learn about the industry, learn about families and what they want, start identifying trends and then build from there.”

Clifford said the company hasn’t yet worked out how it will earn revenue from the products and services it plans to include on the platform. Possible arrangements include revenue sharing or a commissions-based deal with the partner vendors who will be featured on the site.

More immediately, Bereave is working to close a “friends and family” funding round. Clifford declined to say how much the company has raised towards its nearly $1 million goal, but said the company expects to hit the goal by October or November.

This will be Bereave’s second “friends and family” round, following a $300,000 round that allowed the company to launch in 2021.

Once the current round closes, Clifford said, it should provide Bereave with sufficient funding for about 24 months or so of operations, at which point the company would work to raise seed funding in early- to mid-2025.