Eternity’s commemoration platform swaps gravestones for QR codes
Eternity’s commemoration platform swaps gravestones for QR codes
The Israeli company is digitizing the way we commemorate loved ones once they pass on
Commemoration can take many forms. What once started as a statue for the rich and famous turned into obituaries in the local newspapers - and now a hashtag on social media. As time goes on and our world is increasingly lived online, Israeli company Eternity has found a way to respectfully and easily commemorate our loved ones once they have passed on with a build-it-yourself website full of memories that can be submitted by loved ones.
“Our mission and vision was basically to make sure that not only those who are wealthy will be commemorated,” explained Shahar Peled, Eternity CEO. “Not those who have the most special stories, not only the heroes but everyone should be commemorated. Every life story is deserved and important to someone. For now, until we started, there was no solution to make sure that every life story was commemorated. We decided to change it.”
Peled joined co-founders Eran Tor and Rani Cohen, who had both suffered personal loss, to help build the product that would eventually become Eternity. The platform provides easy-to-use tools for those with a variety of computer skills to build a website dedicated to loved ones. This can include the option to upload photos, videos, or text by friends and family that are made public once approved by the site’s moderators. According to Peled, it is the new way that future generations will honor their ancestors.
“The next generation, my nieces, nephews, and future kids, won't want to open the photo albums,” he continued. "It's not their generation. I doubt they will read their books, and I figured my memory, even my parents' memories, are not enough to tell a full life story.”
Peled was speaking at one of his grandparents’ memorial services when he realized that a tool like Eternity could delicately and respectfully honor older generations. As he spoke about their stories of surviving the Holocaust, he knew he didn’t know every detail of their lives and couldn’t share anecdotes from different life stages like high school friends or colleagues of the deceased could. Eternity gives younger people the opportunity to hear about their passed loved ones not just from family members, but from an entire network of people who used to know them.
Eternity already has 2,000 people commemorated on its sites, the majority of which were built by the ‘kids’ of the deceased - thankfully already in middle age. Users can pay a monthly fee of 19 NIS ($5.90) or a lifetime one-off fee of 1,000 NIS ($310). According to Peled, no one has ever canceled an account: they either paid the lifetime fee immediately or eventually upgraded their monthly plans. The company promises to never host ads on the platform to honor the memories and stories being shared.
Many who are familiar with building sites might question why Eternity feels it is filling a gap in a market. There are plenty of sites like Wix that can help users build websites, and social media network sites like Facebook can commemorate user accounts once it is notified that a user has died. Despite this, Peled argues that commemoration sites should contain only certain aspects of life: not every status update or photo revealing high school debauchery. “On Facebook, even when the page is commemorated, you can log in and still see an ad for a bikini on the right or laundry machine on the left, because that's the way Facebook works,” Peled said.
He even argues that Wix, which is designed to help people with no web experience build sites, is too focused on B2B needs and doesn’t yet accommodate needs for commemoration. “The option to create a website is not new… but the option to create a memorial website, and make it as simple as possible for any person to create is. We have an 82-year-old grandma who created a site for her spouse,” he said, also citing the financial benefit of using Eternity over Wix, whose service can reach hundreds of dollars per year.
Sites can be accessed via a QR code, which Eternity helps place on gravestones, benches, and locations around the world. Even though the majority of loved ones getting commemorated are “not tragic”, the company works with organizations for more sensitive deaths like fallen soldiers or for places like education facilities, museums, or houses of worship that want to host their own memorial hubs, which Peled described as “a Wikipedia of commemoration.”
Eternity was entirely bootstrapped by its founders until it received a $300,000 pre-Seed round once its revenue hit $1 million. A few months ago it secured a $5 million Seed round from RT Capital and private investors and will look forward to a Series A in the next year.
“For now, we deal with life stories and we use technology to change the way people celebrate their loved one's life stories for eternity,” Peled concluded. “We don't want their memory to be lost and once it's there on their gravestone it will never be lost… I want to be remembered, even if I won't be a millionaire or famous. My life story will count for some people and I want them to be able to remember me in the way I want them to remember me,” he said.
