Autumn is a New York-based deathcare startup that built what it called the world's first deathcare marketplace: a free platform that walks bereaved Americans through the tangle of tasks that follow a death - funerals, estates, probate, moving, grief - with step-by-step guides and a directory of more than 500,000 local providers like funeral homes, estate attorneys, financial planners and grief specialists. Launched in July 2022 with a $600,000 pre-seed round led by Bullish, the company made the process free for grieving families and earned revenue from providers who paid to be listed.
Daniel Shaw is the co-founder and CEO of Autumn, a New York-based end-of-life marketplace built to help bereaved families navigate the legal, financial, emotional and logistical mess that follows a death. A medical school dropout turned 15-year creative technologist (Director of Digital Accounts at Wieden+Kennedy), Shaw lost a string of close family members over a decade and was appalled by how disorganized and unhelpful the deathcare industry was. So he aggregated more than 500,000 local providers, wrote free guides, and set out to let people manage death the same way they manage life - under the banner 'We make loss more livable.'
Sam Gerstenzang is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow Memorials, a software-enabled funeral and cremation company he started in 2024 after arranging his grandfather's funeral and finding the experience opaque, overwhelming and impersonal. Meadow runs funerals at chapels, beaches, theaters and restaurants instead of traditional funeral homes, with transparent pricing and what Sam calls 'unreasonable hospitality.' Before Meadow he led consumer payments product at Stripe, invested at Andreessen Horowitz, incubated companies at Sidewalk Labs, was early at Imgur, and co-founded Umbrella (acquired by IAC/Angi) and the medspa platform Moxie. In March 2026 Meadow raised a $9M Series A led by Lachy Groom and Haystack.