Updated July 19, 2024 at 4:35 p.m.
PARIS — The confrontation was aggressive but ultimately turned out to be beneficial. In late January, Lilian Delaveau deeply split the investors of French TV show “Who Wants To Be My Associate?” in which aspiring entrepreneurs present a pitch to experienced investors. The 27-year-old pitched Requiem Code, a QR code app that personalizes graves by displaying various memories of the deceased person in augmented reality when put on a funeral tablet.
“I completely disagree with your project. You are wiping out the contemplation. Each person should be allowed to keep a different memory,” the tourism professional Jean-Pierre Nadim told him.
Another juror, Anthony Bourbon, said this comment was “old-school”. Bourbon not only came to the candidate’s rescue live, but also continued to exchange views with him off-air a few weeks later. The meeting turned out to be decisive: His improvised mentor offered him 40,000 euros in exchange for 25% of his company’s capital and convinced him to expand his project to shake up the old funeral industry.
QR Code For Eternity
One month later, the engineer has accepted the controversy. With his geeky beard and faded “Ireland” T-shirt, Delaveau looks like any startupper. He drops punchline after punchline and references Uber, Booking or Airbnb. The entrepreneur, who during his studies had already developed an app dedicated to tinnitus, adopts the startup discourse of disrupters against regulatory and economically outdated systems.
“Tourism, education, and health have been transformed by digital. Why should innovation stop on the verge of funeral homes? In the end, death — however irrevocable and detestable — is an ordinary issue,” he explains.
His appearance on the TV show fueled memory codes sales, which are currently being delivered to several cemeteries in France, but above all, it made him dream bigger.
“Anthony Bourbon challenged me to go much further than Requiem Code and to imagine an entire platform to put competent companies and bereaved families in touch with each other. My marketplace, which has no equivalent, will unburden clients from concrete questions for them to be devoted to their grief and communicate with their relatives.”
Why should innovation stop on the verge of funeral homes?
People already call upon “wedding planners” to organize happy events. Then why not use an intermediary to get in touch with trustworthy professionals likely to manage death according to your needs and budget?
Chatbots to resurrect the deceased
Delaveau unreservedly claims his “death tech” belonging, a niche that has led to the creation of about 20 startups in France. Great Britain, Australia, Canada or the United States are more advanced in this technology. Not only are connected graves widespread there, but some entrepreneurs are pursuing artificial intelligence-based projects worthy of sci-fi series.
Everything is an opportunity to extend the deceased digital life and to create a “digital afterlife” for them. Some even want to reincarnate them as conversational chatbots from content posted on social media. Microsoft went viral by registering a patent on this niche in early 2021.
In France, disrupters have lesser ambitions: Overall, the aim is to question funeral industries’ “unearned incomes”, by launching external services in a highly controlled sector. “We operate in one of the oldest, if not the oldest, professions in the world, but that doesn’t mean our situation couldn’t change,” Philippe Martineau, deputy general manager of the funeral organization UDIFE explains.
Small independent companies try to establish themselves with offers that sometimes compete. Launched in 2019, the Toodays.me app, with the slogan “your memories have a bright future,” helps gather, enrich, and transmit important memories and documents to chosen beneficiaries with a code activated after the death. Various other services are designed to facilitate the post-mortem management of digital data.
Social media for the afterlife
Marie-Bérengère Salmon has had no trouble raising funds for her “world’s first digital cemetery” project. The 48-year-old digital marketing expert admits that she is “not at all a funeral director”. “My goal is not to compete with them on their products, but to offer a complementary service,” she explains from London, where she is based.
Some even want to reincarnate them as conversational chatbots from content posted on social media.
Like a specialized Facebook, Alanna.life is a social platform that allows the creation of pages about dead people, to make a “record” of their life, but also and above all to connect their loved ones with each other. It is up to each family to decide which messages should be kept public or private.
“We can open up general information about funerals and condolences to as many people as possible, while restricting other intimate data to a more limited circle,” Alanna’s founder says.
In four months, the website, which is free for individuals since it is paid through commissions on the services of partners (florists, etc.), has recorded connections from 120 countries, “from Thailand to Greenland”. It could soon be translated into English to tackle foreign markets.
COVID as a booster for the digitally departed
Although these offensives on the traditional funeral industry are disorganized, they are creating enough buzz to encourage the old players to move forward. Le Choix Funéraire, the leading French independent network with around 10% of the market, offers a “virtual village” in which families can connect to answer all questions related to death.
The company’s services include the online filing of wills, recording messages from the deceased to be listened to by grandchildren when they reach adulthood, a memory library where videos and photos can be shared, and assistance in managing Internet accounts.
Not only has the company been broadcasting funerals live via its Sereneo service since 2017, it has also “introduced Teams into funeral homes” to allow relatives of the deceased to talk without leaving their homes. COVID has been speeding up the digital transformation as much as start-ups. “At the height of the health crisis, we have had to handle a death every 30 minutes,” Philippe Martineau soberly recalls.
*Originally published on April 27, 2022, this article was updated July 19, 2024.
