LumenUs Wants to Cut 570 Hours of Death Paperwork With AI

Settling a loved one's affairs takes roughly 570 hours of paperwork on average, and LumenUs, a grief care platform founded last year, wants AI to take over the least human parts of that burden.

Founder Sara Tashakorinia knows the problem firsthand. Her husband died in a car accident eight years ago. What followed was, as she described it to TechCrunch, a mandatory crash course in estate administration delivered at the worst possible moment.

"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, she concluded that AI could help — not with grieving itself, but with the mechanical tasks: finding the right tax forms, filing insurance claims, shutting down bank accounts.

What does LumenUs actually do?

The platform targets people in the immediate aftermath of a death, though Tashakorinia hopes it will eventually support users through the lifelong grieving process.

New users go through an onboarding process that gathers details about their specific situation. The questions are deliberately pointed.

"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.

From there, LumenUs organizes tasks by urgency, separating what must be done immediately from what can wait. The platform can also surface money that grieving families are owed but never knew existed. Billions of dollars in life insurance benefits go unclaimed each year simply 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.

Who is building it?

Tashakorinia's background is in cybersecurity — a critical credential for a product that asks users to hand over sensitive personal and financial information at their most vulnerable moment.

She is building LumenUs with two co-founders:

• Sajad Mirzaei, a former engineer at Google and Box
• Larry Keeley, an innovation scientist, professor, and entrepreneur

The team is also consulting clinicians and social workers while testing the product.

How big is the problem?

LumenUs is attacking a market that touches millions of people every year, each facing the same post-loss avalanche of administration. Tashakorinia's own experience frames the consumer pain bluntly.

"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?" she said.

That 300% casket markup points to a broader grief-adjacent services market with little price transparency — territory a platform that organizes and informs bereaved families could eventually challenge.

When can users access it?

LumenUs is a participant in this year's Startup Battlefield 200, TechCrunch's annual showcase of promising early-stage startups. The platform launches in early access in October.

If LumenUs can prove that AI-guided task management reliably recovers unclaimed benefits and cuts administrative hours for bereaved families, it will have turned one founder's worst year into a defensible position in a market with built-in, universal demand.