LumenUs built an AI platform to ease grief's paperwork burden

When Sara Tashakorinia’s husband died in a car accident eight years ago, she faced the roughly 570 hours of paperwork it takes, on average, to settle a loved one’s affairs. “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 volunteering to help others navigate the same process, Tashakorinia concluded that AI could help — not with the emotional work of grieving, but with its most mundane administrative tasks: finding the right tax forms, filing insurance claims, shutting down bank accounts. The result is LumenUs, the grief-care platform she founded last year to relieve families of some of that administrative burden.

Tashakorinia says the unfairness of the process often only becomes clear in hindsight: she recalls being left with a stack of paperwork, and a funeral home that charged her a 300% markup on a casket. LumenUs will initially focus on the immediate aftermath of a death. New users go through an onboarding process that gathers details about their legal and financial situation and state of mind, which the platform uses to personalize both who they are and what happened to them. From there, it organizes tasks by urgency, helping users work out what needs attention immediately and what can wait — in some cases surfacing money they’re entitled to, since billions of dollars in life insurance benefits go unclaimed each year because people don’t know the money is available.

Tashakorinia, who has a cybersecurity background, is building LumenUs with co-founders Sajad Mirzaei, a former engineer at Google and Box, and Larry Keeley, an innovation scientist, professor, and entrepreneur, while consulting with clinicians and social workers as they test the product. LumenUs — a participant in this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 13-15 in San Francisco — will launch in early access in October.

Why it matters

By automating the administrative side of death, LumenUs is betting AI can help recover some of the billions of dollars in unclaimed life insurance benefits and spare grieving families hundreds of hours of paperwork at the moment they’re least equipped to handle it.