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Mark Cuban-backed Eterneva raises $10M to turn your loved one’s ashes into diamonds
The loss of a loved one is perhaps one of the most traumatic things a person can experience.
When it comes to memorializing someone after their death, most people think of planning funerals and/or picking out caskets or tombstones. And those things are typically done with the help of a funeral home.
Enter Austin-based Eterneva, which is building a rare direct-to-consumer brand in the end-of life space. The four-year-old startup creates diamonds from the cremated ashes or hair of people and pets. It’s a highly unusual business but one that seems to be resonating with people seeking a way to keep a piece of their loved ones close to them after their death.
Since its inception, Eterneva has seen triple-digit growth in sales — including in 2020, when it more than doubled its revenue, according to CEO and co-founder Adelle Archer. And today, the company is announcing an “oversubscribed” $10. million Series A funding round led by Tiger Management with participation from Goodwater Capital, Capstar Ventures, NextCoast Ventures and Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban. (For the unacquainted, Tiger Management is the hedge fund and family office of Julian Robertson from which Tiger Global Management descended.)
“It was an extremely competitive round,” Archer told TechCrunch. “We received three term sheets and were able to put together an all-star investment group.” That investment group included Capstar Managing DIrector Kathryn Cavanaugh, who also joined Eterneva’s board; Lydia Jett — one of the top female partners at Softbank overseeing their $100 billion Vision Fund and Kara Nortman, managing partner at Upfront Capital, one of the first women to make managing partner at a VC fund and co-founder of Angel City with actress Natalie Portman.
Archer and co-founder Garrett Ozar launched Eterneva in the first quarter of 2017 after working together at BigCommerce. The company’s origin story is a very personal one for Archer. Her close friend and business mentor, Tracey Kaufman, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and ended up passing away at the age of 47. With no next of kin, Kaufman left her cremated ashes to her aunt, best friend and Archer.
“We started looking into different options but all the websites we landed on were so lackluster, somber and overwhelming,” Archer recalls. “Tracey was the most amazing person, and I felt like when you lose remarkable people, you needed better options to honor and memorialize them.”
At the time, Archer was working on a lab-grown diamond startup. Over dinner with a diamond scientist during which she was discussing her mentor’s death, the scientist said, “Well, you know Adele, there is carbon in ashes, so we could get the carbon out of Tracey’s ashes and make a diamond.”
The thought blew Archer’s mind.
“I knew that I had to do that, 100%. Tracy was such a vibrant person, it suited her so perfectly,” she said. “And I’d have a part of her with me all the time.”
Eterneva co-founders Garrett Ozar and Adelle Archer. Image Credits: Eterneva
It was the first diamond ever created by Eterneva, and it gave Archer a chance to be a customer of her own product, which she believes has helped in building an experience for her other customers. Soon, she became “fully focused” on the idea, which she viewed as a way to give grieving people “brightness and healing and a beautiful way to honor their loved ones.”
Since inception, Eterneva has created nearly 1,500 diamonds for over 1,000 customers. It can do colorless or nearly any color including black, yellow, blue, orange and green. The entry price for an Eterneva diamond is $2,999 and that goes up based on the size and color. Pets make up about 40% of Eterneva’s business.
“We view ourselves as the complete opposite tone of everything else in this space,” Archer said. “A lot of people are trying to solve planning and logistics around the end of life. We’re about helping people move forward, and building a platform for the celebration of life.”
The process to create the diamond is intricate, according to Archer, taking 7 to 9 months. The intent is to bring the customer along the journey by sharing the process with them at each stage through videos and pictures.
“We do it in parallel with their processing grief, which is super isolating,” Archer said. “They are usually in a different place with their grief than when they first started.”
One of the plans with the new capital is to enable more people to participate in person with the process, such as starting the machine work, or telling the jeweler stories about their loved one and coming up with a custom design that might have little details that represent aspects of their loved one’s life.
The company also plans to use the money to scale their funeral home channel program nationwide via Enterprise partnerships and scaling its operations and capacity in Austin so it can keep up with demand.
Eterneva is banking on the fact that more and more “people don’t want traditional funerals anymore.”
“They want personalization and meaning,” said Archer. “We plan to evolve the platform with different products and services down the road.”
The startup also wants to continue to build awareness around its brand. Recently, it’s seen more than a dozen videos on TikTok about its diamonds go viral, according to Archer.
Prior to the Series A, Eterneva had raised a total of $6.7 million from angels and institutions. Its seed round was a $3 million financing led by Austin-based Springdale Ventures in 2020. Mark Cuban first became an investor in the company when Archer and Ozar appeared on “Shark Tank.” Cuban took a 9% stake in the company in exchange for a $600,000 investment. Despite claims that the company was a scam, Cuban has stood by the science behind it and put money in the latest round as well.
Via email, he told TechCrunch he views an Eterneva diamond as “a unique, socially responsible way to stay connected to loved ones.”
“There is still so much upside and growth in their future,” Cuban wrote. “So I doubled down.”
He went on to describe the creation of diamond from the hair or ashes of a loved one as “such an intense personal commitment.”
“Eternava takes a very emotional and difficult [time] and helps people walk through their journey in a trusted way that I don’t think anyone else can come close to,” Cuban added.
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Mark Cuban: ‘Raising money isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an obligation’
Mark Cuban isn’t impressed that you’ve raised money.
“If you think the accomplishment is raising money first, we’re probably not gonna get along,” said Cuban in an Extra Crunch Live interview. “If your orientation is ‘I got to raise the money first,’ you don’t really have a company yet, and you really haven’t accomplished anything yet. […] Sweat equity is the best equity.”
We also got his take on today’s economy, the nation’s direction and his notes on what startups should do to survive in the new world. Happily, as we had an hour to chat, we managed to cover a lot of ground. The full conversation (YouTube) is after the jump, and we’ve excerpted a number of quotes for your perusal.
But up top we wanted to share Cuban’s notes regarding which companies should accept Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds from the Small Business Administration. The matter became a hot-button issue in and around Silicon Valley, where initial debate centered around which startups could access the money. After it became clear the first installment of PPP funds wasn’t going to last, whether startups should access to the capital at all became a question. Some venture-backed companies even decided to return their PPP check.
According to Cuban, when PPP was first put together, the market’s “perspective was that there’d be plenty of money for everybody. You know, people didn’t really want to do the math.” Cuban said that if there was $350 billion in the pot and one million small businesses, the fund would have worked out to $350,000 apiece. “Well guess what,” he said, “there are 30 million companies, [and] like 20 of them are independent contractors.”
Once you did the calculations again with that many companies eligible for PPP funds, you could tell that the money wasn’t going to last. So Cuban told firms that he’s invested in where he has sway to “either not apply or just pay it back immediately.” Why? “For the betterment of the country and the economy,” he said, adding that “if you do have access to capital” or “your business isn’t dramatically impacted [then] let’s leave [the PPP money] for the people who need it the most.”
As noted, the full video is below (you can join Extra Crunch here!), along with Cuban’s notes on startup advice during the pandemic, American 2.0 (and Marc Andreessen’s essay), AI, pre-seed companies, his future in politics and how to pitch him.
Mark Cuban on the record
How he’s advising portfolio companies during the pandemic:
So first and foremost, communicate. Second is be honest. Third is be transparent. And fourth is be authentic. Because everybody is nervous. Everybody is terrified at a certain level. So you just have to recognize that. People are going to need that honesty from you and people are going to want communications from you. That’s been the primary thing around what these companies should do.
Regarding cutting costs: Every business is different. On the smallest ones, they’re already grinding, and it’s typically dependent on the founder. I’ve really tried to encourage people to keep all their employees on if at all possible. That there’s gonna be a lot of change and that’s going to create a lot of opportunity. So, if you can hold on to your employees and push forward in any way, shape, or form, you may have an opportunity.
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Serena Williams, Mark Cuban invest $3 million in Mahmee, a digital support network for new moms
Tennis superstar and mom to a 22-month-old, Serena Williams has joined Mark Cuban to invest $3 million seed funding in Mahmee, a startup working toward filling the critical care gap in postpartum care.
For those who’ve never given birth or who (count your blessings!) never had any mishaps in the hospital or afterwards, the weeks and months following childbirth can be extremely hard on the new mom, with estimates as high as one in five women suffering from postpartum depression or anxiety and about 9% of women experiencing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following childbirth — and those are just the mood and mental health disorders.
Physical recovery, even for those with a healthy, run-of-the-mill birth, takes at least six weeks — eight weeks if you’ve had a C-section. And then there are all the medical complications. Williams, who has a history of blood clots, ended up basically shouting at the doctors to give her a CT scan that saved her life.
The real issue, at the heart of all this, according to Mahmee co-founder Melissa Hanna, is that “the data is fragmented.” She says this is why she built a network to get new moms the support they need — from their community, other moms and medical providers.
Mahmee provides not only online group discussions with other moms going through the same thing and at the same stage but also connection to your medical provider. On top of that, it adds support from a trained “maternity coach” who can flag if something is wrong.
One example Hanna used was a new mom who was exhibiting symptoms of septic shock. The co-founder says a coach was able to call this mom on the spot and get her to contact her OB-GYN right away.
There are other online services like Postpartum Support International (PSI) and the Bloom Foundation, which both provide a sort of digital network and resources for new moms, but Hanna believes it is that missing link to medical professionals after mom has gone home from the hospital that really makes a difference.
“We’re so focused on delivering a healthy baby that mom gets side-lined,” she told TechCrunch. Adding in a statement, “And this industry is lacking the IT infrastructure needed to connect these professionals from different organizations to each other, and to follow and monitor patients across practices and health systems. This missing element creates gaps in care. Mahmee is the glue that connects the care ecosystem and closes the gaps.”
While other sites mentioned above are free to use, Mahmee, which goes beyond social support to providing engagement and patient monitoring, makes money through group and individual video calls (the introductory session with a coach is free) and various support groups. There are also different payment tiers starting at $20 a month and up toward $200 per month where new parents can ask unlimited questions through a HIPAA-secure, online dashboard connecting them with their medical providers and Mahmee coaches.
Do new moms need to pay someone to help them out and monitor them medically after they get home from the hospital? Possibly. Some local hospitals and medical networks also provide various types of help — both through counseling and new parent support groups. But often it can take weeks to get a counseling session at a busy hospital and your OB may have too many patients to call and check up on you. Having this type of support could just save your life — and, if anything else, checking in with a group of moms going through the same thing could be the key to saving your sanity.
Hanna admits it’s early days for her startup, but tells TechCrunch there are more than 1,000 providers in the Mahmee network so far. She plans to use the $3 million to grow her team, including engineers, clinicians and sales staff, and hints she’s working on several partnerships within the healthcare industry right now.
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This startup streamlines the pro bono work of lawyers, including those fighting for immigrants at the border
Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday were on very different paths until three years ago. Conrad was an associate at the powerhouse law firm Skadden Arps. Meanwhile, Sonday, a Princeton grad and the first person in her family to go to college, was reflecting on the several years she’d spent with the U.S. Department of Justice in Mexico City, working to extradite fugitives.
As it happens, both were coming to similar conclusions about the U.S. legal system, including that it’s especially challenging for people who don’t speak English. For Conrad, an opportunity to litigate a pro bono asylum case would set her on a path of wanting to do more for people fleeing persecution from their own countries. For Sonday, the experience of working with foreign governments had a similar impact.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that soon after they were introduced by a mutual friend, they decided to create Paladin, a New York-based SaaS business that today helps legal teams sign up for pro bono opportunities, enables coordinators to track the lawyers’ work, and which captures some of the stories and impact that the lawyers are making through their efforts. This last piece is particularly important, as the software helps legal departments see the return on investment for their attorneys’ donated time.
The company’s offering is timely, including for legal departments like that of Verizon, which has 900 attorneys and a global pro bono program that it uses Paladin to help manage. (Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch.) Lyft, a newer client, has a 50-person legal department and recently launched its own pro bono team.
Given how quickly immigration and other policies are being changed under the Trump administration and uneven guidance from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the need for legal help is growing by the day.
For example, Lyft — which is among a long line of tech companies to speak out in support of immigrants’ rights — is committing some of its lawyers to reuniting families that have been separated at the southern U.S. border, says Conrad.
One question is how scalable Paladin’s offering is. The biggest challenge for the outfit right now would seem to be that few corporate lawyers do the kind of pro bono work that’s often most needed but involves litigation matters outside the scope of what they practice, including around immigration laws, social security benefits and criminal and domestic abuse matters.
Sonday says Paladin has the solution to that, explaining that the seven-person company has raised $1.1 million from investors — Mark Cuban, Hyde Park Ventures, Backstage Capital, R2 Ventures, MergeLane and Chaac Ventures, among them — toward that end.
What it plans to build, exactly: infrastructure that connects organizations on the ground with legal services and law firms all over the world, no matter their size. Basically, it will begin acting as a matchmaker for legal departments, helping lawyers find the pro bono work about which they feel most passionately.
Ultimately, Conrad and Sonday are betting that anything that makes the process of finding pro bono work a lot easier than it is today will increase the numbers of attorneys who give back to society. They also think that when law firms can better track the impact their employees are making, we’ll see more, and bigger, pro bono programs.
Says Sonday, “Right now, just 10 to 20 percent of law firms have someone in-house to manage that pro bono work. If we can help the other 80 to 90 percent of lawyers” connect with the people who need them most — and who they feel good about helping — it’s a win-win all around.
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Meta SaaS raises $1.5 million from Mark Cuban and others
Meta SaaS is a product that helps you cancel other products. Like Cardlife and Cleanshelf, Meta SaaS looks at all of your software-as-a-service subscriptions and tells you which ones you use and, more important, which ones you don’t. Founded by Arlo Gilbert and Scott Hertel, the product raised $1.5 million in seed from Mark Cuban with participation from Barracuda Networks, Capital… Read More
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As eSports popularity explodes, betting needs to be regulated
Esports betting has boomed in the last five years, attracting investments from celebrities, investors and entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher — even the former NBA Commissioner, David Stern, has talked about it on many forums. Gambling in eSports has charmed stakeholders but it may have created a monster in the gaming industry. As with every growing industry, it’s… Read More
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uBeam’s Ultrasound Wireless Charging Is Real, And About To Be Really Funded
What if wireless power at a distance actually worked? It does. uBeam invented a way to wirelessly send energy up to 15 feet away with ultrasound. What if you could slap a wireless charging case on your phone and charge it while you move around or use it? uBeam invented that too. While early uBeam prototype were massive, non-portable boxes that merely shot power around, it now has a working… Read More
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