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.
“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 said.
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 This Grief Care Platform Exists
“I think going through it, your threshold of pain is so high, and you’re so lost that you don’t really realize, why do people treat you this way? 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.
“We are asking very specific questions to understand the legal and financial means, and their state of mind, and this is only to personalize who they are, and then personalizing what happened,” Tashakorinia said.
How the Grief Care Platform Organizes Tasks
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.
“We are using AI to automate as much as we can to save time during this process, and give it back to [users],” she said.
The grief care platform addresses a painful gap in the death care industry. Families often face a fragmented system of banks, insurers, government agencies, and funeral homes, each with its own paperwork, deadlines, and jargon. LumenUs aims to consolidate that chaos into a single guided experience that respects both the user’s time and their emotional state.
The Team Behind the Grief Care Platform
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.
That combination of technical and human-centered expertise matters. A grief care platform cannot simply be efficient — it must also be empathetic. By working with clinicians and social workers, the LumenUs team is trying to ensure the product does not feel cold or transactional at a moment when users are most vulnerable.
Early Access and Startup Battlefield 200
LumenUs, a participant in this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 — the annual showcase of promising early-stage startups at TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place October 13-15 in San Francisco — will launch in early access in October.
For families navigating the immediate aftermath of a death, the grief care platform represents a practical alternative to the 570-hour paperwork burden that Tashakorinia once faced alone. While it cannot remove grief, it can remove some of the administrative weight that makes grief harder to bear.
