Introducing The Death Economy
I went looking for a map of deathtech and couldn’t find one. So I made it.
The Death Economy is a directory of 83 companies working on the end of life, sorted into 20 categories across four stages: planning before a death, logistics at the time of one, the administrative work after, and grief.
It all gets called deathtech, but these companies aren’t in the same business. They just show up at different points in the same bad week. A will company sells to someone thinking about the future. A funeral platform sells to someone with four days to make twenty decisions. An estate tool sells to a lawyer billing hours. An AI that talks like your dead father sells to someone who isn’t ready to stop hearing that voice. Same family, four buyers, sometimes years apart. That’s why the directory is sorted by stage.
I build in this space, so this wasn’t curiosity. I needed to see the whole picture before I could make sense of any part of it. Here’s what stood out.
Planning is crowded. Twenty-five companies will help you make a will. At that point it’s a feature, not a company. And look at who they’ve started selling to: five sell estate planning to financial advisors, five sell drafting software to lawyers. They’ve stopped chasing you and started chasing the person you already trust with your money.
Almost nobody builds for the family. Twenty-three companies work on post-death administration. Three of them serve executors. The rest sell to attorneys, fiduciaries, and heir-tracing firms. So the daughter spending eight months closing her mother’s estate has three options and a filing cabinet.
Seven companies build AI versions of dead people. Three do grief support. I don’t have a tidy point to make about that. It just kept bothering me.
One disclosure. I’m building a company in this space and it’s listed here. Better you hear it from me.
Every week I’ll send out what’s new: companies, funding, category shifts, and anything I got wrong. Past issues are in the archive. The directory updates as things move, and there’s a submit form if I missed you or described you badly. Both will happen.
Listings are free. Nobody paid to be in this.