When Sara Tashakorinia's husband died in a car accident eight years ago, she was handed a second job she never applied for: roughly 570 hours of administrative work, 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 of volunteering to help others through the same maze — finding tax forms, filing insurance claims, shutting down bank accounts — she concluded that AI could take on the least human parts of the process. LumenUs, the grief-care platform she founded last year, does exactly that, leaving the messy, human experience of grieving to the people living it.
Onboarding asks specific questions about a family's legal and financial situation and their state of mind, then personalises a task list. The platform sorts those tasks by urgency, separating what must be handled immediately from what can wait — and in some cases surfaces money families did not know was available. Billions of dollars in life insurance benefits go unclaimed each year because people never learn they are owed them.
Tashakorinia is building the company with co-founders Sajad Mirzaei, a former engineer at Google and Box, and Larry Keeley, an innovation scientist and professor. Her own background is in cybersecurity — an asset for a product that asks users to hand over deeply sensitive personal and financial data — and the team is consulting clinicians and social workers as it tests the product.
LumenUs is part of this year's Startup Battlefield 200, TechCrunch's showcase of early-stage startups, and will open early access in October. The company's long-term ambition is to support people through the lifelong process of grieving; it starts, deliberately, with the immediate aftermath of a death.
