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. 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. 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.
When people initially join the platform, they go through an onboarding process in which they share information about the nature of their particular situation. From there, the platform organizes tasks by urgency, helping users decipher what needs to be done immediately and what can wait. In some cases, this can even help people discover that they’re entitled to money that can help ease the financial burden of death.
In fact, billions of dollars in life insurance benefits go unclaimed because people don’t know they’re available. Tashakorinia has a background in cybersecurity, which is sure to prove essential for building a product that asks people to share so much sensitive personal and financial information. She is building LumenUs alongside co-founders Sajad Mirzaei, a former engineer at Google and Box, and Larry Keeley, an innovation scientist, professor, and entrepreneur.
The team is also consulting with clinicians and social workers while testing the product. LumenUs, a participant in this year’s upcoming Startup Battlefield 200, TechCrunch’s annual showcase of promising early-stage startups, will launch in early access in October.
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