Cake, a Boston startup whose app helps guide users through end-of-life planning, including giving them a checklist of recommended steps like designating a healthcare proxy and buying life insurance, and allowing them to create an online handbook of posthumous preferences and wishes for loved ones, doctors, and lawyers to carry out.
Everdays is a little different, but the company plans to keep expanding its offerings. Everdays expects to broaden its outreach to people in hospice or palliative care, who can build their death announcements ahead of time and get connected to end-of-life insurance policies—a $5 billion annual business that Alhermizi says only covers 3 percent of the addressable market—and other funerary commerce.
Alhermizi also sees an opportunity in people dealing with the death of a loved one, who might be more inclined to consider their own mortality and need for advanced planning. “Behind the scenes, we’re a pre-planning machine,” he says, and that planning is one way the app already makes money from funeral homes and other businesses.
Everdays closed a $12 million Series A funding round at the end of January, bringing its total investment since inception to $17 million. The round was led by Houston-based Gordy Companies, the family investment fund run by Russell Gordy, an oilman and one of the largest land owners in Texas. A second, undisclosed Houston-based family office also invested in the Series A, and Alhermizi says support from the Lone Star State is crucial because Houston is the headquarters of many companies in the funeral industry, including SCI, the largest funeral home business in North America. “The companies there are more interested in our mission,” he says.
In 2019, Alhermizi plans to double Everdays’ headcount to 60 people. Today, he says Everdays serves one-half of one percent of daily deaths in the United States . He would like to see the company serve four to five percent of that population within three years.
“Someday, we’d like to also do wedding and birth announcements,” Alhermizi says. “We want to be the brand associated with milestone events.”
