Serving millions of people every month, Cake, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, offers a digital solution for end-of-life planning and post-loss support. With a library of resources and interactive tools, Cake’s cloud-based platform connects people with novel solutions and helps families navigate the complexities of death and grieving.
We spent time with CEO Suelin Chen to learn more about Cake and how its digital innovations are bringing change to a largely bricks-and-mortar industry.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about Cake.
We’re the world’s largest online website for funeral and end-of-life planning; we touch about 40 million people every year. Our goal is to help every single person dealing with death and end of life — which is everyone, at multiple points in their lives. We want to help people figure out what their options are and empower them to make informed decisions.
Are you primarily direct to consumer, or do you work through providers?
We do both. We touch about half of all deaths in the U.S., so we have a lot of consumers coming to Cake organically. But we also work with many different types of companies and organizations, in two different ways.
First, we work with companies to help them offer end-of-life planning and funeral planning tools to their audiences. Second, we work with companies who are interested in accessing our audience. For everyone who comes to our site, we can match them to products and services that they might want or need. We do this because end-of-life is such a confusing and fragmented space, and there’s not a lot of great information online.
What kinds of goods and services are you talking about?
There’s a wide range. On the planning side, we offer access to online wills, healthcare documents and insurance. We also help people dealing with loss, including finding services such as cremation providers, which is now the most common way people choose to be buried — 60% of people now choose cremation. We also work with companies in the legacy, memorialization and remembrance space.
With so many people choosing cremation, there are a lot of companies figuring out meaningful ways that people can store their loved one’s ashes, or even transform those ashes into something that might be more meaningful — such as turning those ashes into a diamond. Most people have never heard of these options, and we’re trying to make them aware of the many choices they have to memorialize and remember their loved ones.
Can families work together on Cake to coordinate their plans?
We have a planning tool that people can share with whomever they want. Part of our goal is to guide people through the general categories of things they need to consider so they can have a conversation with their loved one — for example, “What are your wishes for how you want to be buried?” Those can be very awkward conversations, and people often resist having them.
What was the inspiration behind founding the company?
My background is in healthcare, and I saw how we spend an enormous amount of energy and resources toward extending life as long as possible. But at some point, everyone passes, and I witnessed how families often feel very lost. They don’t have enough information to make informed decisions, especially during a very emotional and rushed period of time.
People going through this phase of life are very underserved, and we want to make it better. Some people are fortunate and find a funeral director or other professional who’s really good, but the funeral industry in general is limited in certain ways, especially regarding all the new options that are currently available. Death is an important and essential part of being human and we want to make it as much about honoring life as we can.
Can you say more about those limitations in the industry?
Consumer preferences are changing rapidly. Some in the funeral industry are very forward-looking and in tune with the consumer, but many are still doing things the older, traditional way. There’s still a big market for that — and there’s no value judgement from Cake about what path people choose. But there are also a lot of people who want something different, and the reality is that there’s no obvious place to go for those who want a more modern and non-traditional path.
Why is the funeral industry adapting so slowly?
More than 80% of funeral homes in the U.S. are still privately owned and are often family businesses, so the industry is fragmented, and it’s hard to get aggregate information.
The modern consumer wants information and price transparency, and often their starting place is the internet. But the funeral industry as a whole has been slow to come online. I’m not saying that this industry should be entirely online, without human interaction: I think that personal interaction and the human rituals around grieving are incredibly essential. But I do think that the future for this industry is omnichannel, with a digital component and an in-person component.
What are some of the challenges you’ve face while building Cake?
The biggest challenge for us is that there are so many problems to solve. Unlike some industries that are crowded and where you try to find your niche as a company, this space is blue ocean. There are so many things that are yet to be solved, because the biggest funeral companies in the country haven’t addressed them online in any significant way. So the challenge for our team is to know what to prioritize and focus on.
What are Cake’s plans for the future?
We’re going to be launching a membership product. People may not need us every day, but when they need us, they really need us. The goal of a membership is to overcome the fragmentation of the space and start building a relationship to be helpful when we can be, and so people have an obvious place to go when they need to arrange a funeral or make other plans. The need is high, and we’re trying to be the most helpful online resource in this industry.