Rachel Edwards and Erica Kwan are building Gravely to help families navigate the paperwork, phone calls, and decisions that come after a death.
Rachel Edwards’s father was in hospice, and she and her sister were trying to prepare for what was coming. “We didn’t even know what questions we were supposed to be asking,” she says.
The hospice, she says, “provided incredible care for my dad.” The resources available to the two sisters for navigating the aftermath were, in her words, “very limited.” They were suddenly making decisions about what needed to happen while he was in hospice, what would happen immediately after he died, funeral and cremation arrangements, paperwork and logistics. “We had never done this before,” she says, “and there wasn’t any one place to turn to understand the whole process.”
The two of them were in a common position. In a study the National Funeral Directors Association released in 2025, based on more than 4,000 consumer surveys in 20 countries, nearly half of respondents had never planned a funeral.
Rachel lost her father in 2025 and started Gravely afterward. She is its co-founder and CEO, based in Austin, Texas. Gravely is a platform that helps families navigate what happens before and after a death: in her words, “what needs to happen now, what can wait and where to find the right help.” A family can begin by telling Gravely what is happening, in a text-based experience at chat.withgravely.com, and Gravely is being built to guide them from there through the decisions and tasks that matter to them, in the order they matter.
“Why does the hardest moment in life also have to be the most confusing one?” she wrote in a post inviting families to work with Gravely. “With Gravely, we believe that it doesn’t.”
No Checklist of Fifty Things
If someone comes to Gravely after a parent dies, Rachel says, “they shouldn’t be confronted with a giant checklist of fifty things they suddenly need to do.” Instead, she says, “we try to understand their situation and guide them through the decisions and tasks that actually matter to them, in the order that they matter.”
That might mean helping someone understand what happens with the body, how to evaluate a funeral home or cremation provider, how many death certificates they may need, and which financial and administrative tasks are urgent and which can wait. It can also mean pointing to products, services and support “for everything from cremation keepsakes to a celebration of life.”
The starting point has been kept simple. Gravely has been experimenting with a text-based intake because, she says, someone going through a death “does not necessarily want to create another account, download another app or navigate a complicated product.” Sometimes, in her words, “they simply want to say, ‘My dad died this morning. What do I do?’”
“The experience we are trying to build should feel less like software a family has to learn and more like having a knowledgeable person beside you who can help you work through what comes next.”
Rachel Edwards, Co-Founder & CEO, Gravely
She says she now sees versions of her own experience in the families who come to Gravely.
Many Decisions at Once
Those families have asked for help evaluating funeral homes, thinking through hospice decisions, deciding between burial and cremation, finding cremation and memorial products, and planning celebrations of life and other events after someone dies. “None of those individual decisions necessarily sounds impossible,” Rachel says. “The problem is that families are often making many of these decisions at once, while grieving, and the experience is incredibly fragmented.”
“A hospice provider may do its part well, a funeral home may do its part well and an attorney may do their part well,” she says, “but the family is still left trying to connect all of those dots.” That is what she means when she says innovation in death care often stalls: “existing systems are busy keeping up with today’s demands with very little capacity to build for tomorrow.”
“There are a lot of people doing important work inside the system. What is often missing is someone looking at the experience from the family’s perspective from beginning to end.”
Rachel, Co-Founder & CEO, Gravely
Looking from the family’s side, Gravely changed its own intake.
The Intake That Asked Too Much
Gravely is, in Rachel’s words, “still in the early stage.” It launched its MVP this summer and is now working directly with its first families. One early lesson, she says, was “realizing that the way we had designed intake was asking too much of people at exactly the moment when they had the least capacity to navigate something complicated.” So, she says, “rather than defending what we had built, we changed it and started testing a much simpler text-based experience.”
The company has completed its first end-to-end concierge experience and has supported several other families at different points in the process. Those early cases, she says, are helping the team understand “where technology is sufficient, where people need human support and how families actually want to interact with us during an incredibly stressful period.”
Rachel now has a co-founder. Erica Kwan has joined Gravely as Co-Founder & CTO. The two were introduced in the spring because both were building in the end-of-life space. “At the time, we weren’t entirely sure whether we were going to be competitors or collaborators… so we kept talking,” Rachel wrote when she announced it. Erica, she wrote, spent her early career as an engineer at Square and then as Co-Founder & CTO of another startup. After losing her mom, she spent several months working inside a funeral home to better understand the industry firsthand.
On partnerships, Gravely is in what she calls “early pilot conversations” with organizations across funeral technology, funeral homes and hospice care. “Nothing there is far enough along that I would characterize it as a signed large-scale partnership yet,” she says, “but we are actively exploring how Gravely can fit alongside the organizations families already rely on.”
This is her second company, and she says the second time is different.
Style by Rachel, Then JPMorgan
“When I started my first company, I think I assumed that being a good founder meant having all the answers and doing everything yourself,” Rachel says. “Now I think much more of the job involves getting close enough to the problem that you are willing to change your answer repeatedly.”
That first company was Style by Rachel, a styling company she built, she says, “into a national business, working with clients across the country.” By the time she graduated from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in 2022 and moved to New York to join JPMorgan, she had transitioned much of the day-to-day management to someone else. She sold the company about six months later, in 2023. The experience, she says, gave her “a much better appreciation for building something that can eventually exist beyond the founder.”
At JPMorgan she was a Vice President in Digital Private Markets, working “at the intersection of investment banking, venture capital and business development.” A significant part of the role was sourcing early-stage companies by building relationships with founders, venture firms and accelerators. Looking at companies from that side of the table, she says, taught her “to distinguish between a compelling story and an underlying business that actually works.”
The second time around, she says, she has “much less attachment to the original version of an idea.” She puts it this way: “With Gravely, I am much more comfortable saying, ‘We don’t know yet.’ I care enormously about the vision, but I am much less precious about exactly how we get there.”
The vision is the part she has had to defend.
What Investors Ask
Rachel has written about the pushback she hears from potential investors. One version: “People only experience a handful of deaths in their lifetime, so isn’t there a ceiling on this market?” Another, which she calls her personal favorite: “Death is a one time event, how do you retain your customers?”
Her instinct, she wrote, had been to explain and defend the opportunity. Her answer now: “For Gravely the question is not whether the market exists, it’s whether the current experience is good enough. And in my opinion, it’s far from it.”
“Death care is an enormous part of life and the economy,” she says, “yet the consumer experience has received relatively little attention from technology and venture capital compared with other major life events.” The scale is on the public record: 3,072,666 deaths were registered in the United States in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. She and Erica, she says, “believe there is an opportunity to build a significant consumer company here while making an extraordinarily difficult experience easier for families.”
Founders should listen carefully to objections, she wrote, but “the trick is not to re-shape your thesis every time someone challenges you. As an entrepreneur one of the most valuable things is your point of view, especially early on.”
Her Dad’s Name Was Gary
Asked for the one person who shaped how she works, Rachel answers in two words: “My dad.” The rest of her answer is about what losing him changed.
“Losing him changed the way I think about time, what deserves my energy and what is worth building, and that perspective has shaped both Gravely and how I approach my life much more broadly.”
Rachel, Co-Founder & CEO, Gravely
In a post for National Grief Awareness Day, she wrote about what people say to someone who is grieving. Often the first thing someone asks is “What happened?” or “How did he die?” Her response: “All I want to talk about is how he lived and what we loved to do together.”
So, in her words: “My dad’s name was Gary. He loved the beach and the ocean, even though, fun fact, he couldn’t swim!” In the same post she added: “After losing my father, I am a different person, and that’s ok.”
A colleague, she says, would recognize one habit of hers. “I ask a lot of questions and I rarely take no for an answer,” she says. “I would much rather understand why something is happening and question if there is a better way to do things than accept that ‘this is how it has always been done.’”
Where Rachel Is Now
What she is working on now is the next version of Gravely. “We are taking everything we have learned from our first families and using it to build the next version of Gravely,” she says, “while developing the partnerships that can put it in front of families when they actually need it.”
There are two readers she most wants this to reach. The first is the person who has just lost a parent, a spouse or someone else close to them, or who knows that loss is coming soon. They can start at chat.withgravely.com. The second is the organizations already supporting those families: funeral homes, hospice organizations, health systems, obituary platforms and others. She would like more of them to understand “how Gravely is trying to connect a very fragmented experience.”
Outside the company, there is music. “I’m also a musician and songwriter,” she says. “I release music under my alter-ego Sage Sojourn. Music offers me a completely different creative outlet from building companies.”
What she wants first, she says, is for “more families to know that Gravely exists before they need it during one of the hardest moments of their lives.” And if a reader remembers one thing from this article, she hopes it is “that families should not have to figure all of this out alone.”
Five Lines from Rachel’s Diary
- “We talk about our culture being death-phobic. I think we’re ‘grief-phobic’ too.”
- “I believe one of the most overlooked opportunities in business is solving the problems people avoid talking about.”
- “Not every experiment will work and that’s kind of the point.”
- “Building a company can be lonely. Building a company around death and grief can be especially so.”
- “There are very few overnight successes when you can see all of the years that preceded them.”
From the Diary of Rachel Edwards
Rachel Edwards is an Austin, Texas-based founder and the Co-Founder & CEO of Gravely.
| Role | Co-Founder & CEO, Gravely |
| Based in | Austin, Texas, United States |
| Previously | JPMorganChase, Vice President, Digital Private Markets (2022 to 2024). Style by Rachel, Founder (2018 to 2023) |
| Also | Musician and songwriter, releasing music as Sage Sojourn |
“I want to make death easier to navigate so people can spend more of their energy on the people they love and less of it figuring out what they are supposed to do next.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Rachel Edwards because she describes a company at the stage it is at. Her answers name what Gravely has done (an MVP, a first end-to-end concierge experience, several other families supported) and what it has not (a signed large-scale partnership). What convinces the editors is the intake decision: a founder who changes what she has built because it asks too much of the people using it. The piece runs for the family who needs to know Gravely exists before the day they need it.
Executives Diary, Editorial
