Grief Wellness Startup Eterneva Adds $3M To Seed Round

Grief wellness and memorial diamond startup Eterneva raised an oversubscribed $3 million seed extension round led by Springdale Ventures.

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The Austin-based company is a developer of diamond technology that converts cremated ashes of loved ones into diamonds. Customers can personalize the diamonds’ size, color, cut and inscription.

In addition to Springdale, 27 other individuals and venture firms participated in the round, including new investors Next Coast Ventures, SoGal Ventures, and Founder Collective. Eterneva previously raised $1.8 million in seed and angel rounds, both in 2019, according to Crunchbase data. With this new funding, the company has raised a total of $4.8 million since it was founded in 2016.

Co-founder and CEO Adelle Archer told Crunchbase News that the new funds will be used to expand Eterneva’s laboratory in Austin where it grows the diamonds, as well as invest in its digital grief wellness experience around the memorial diamonds.

“A big part of our strategy is vertically integrating into other areas as well as building a much larger diamond lab facility in Austin so we can bring more and more growth in-house,” Archer said. “We are also evaluating our customer experience and want to allow more customers to meet our team, as well as be a part of putting their loved ones’ ashes into the machine.”

In addition to its Austin lab, the company has laboratories in Germany and Switzerland, she added.

Archer and co-founder Garrett Ozar appeared on “Shark Tank” in late 2019, where the pair was backed by business mogul Mark Cuban. Since then, the company has gone on to serve more than 500 customers, and its celebration of life program and curated grief journey is being studied by Baylor University.

“The study speaks to the very core of who we are as a grief wellness brand,” Archer said. “Folks are coming out the other side in a different place with their grief, so Baylor is studying that over the course of a year, and we think it will yield meaningful research that hasn’t been done in decades.”

In May, the company began offering a free service to funeral homes and crematoriums to digitize all of their arrangement materials in under 72 hours. In June, the company signed its second funeral home partnership with Phaneuf Funeral Homes & Crematorium to offer those services in New Hampshire and Vermont. Eterneva also has a partnership with Schoedinger Funeral Home and Cremation Services in Columbus, Ohio.

Archer explained that Eterneva has been a direct-to-consumer company, but when the COVID-19 pandemic happened, the company began partnering with funeral homes to help them go digital.

“We thought about how we could add value to the industry right now, and one of the things we thought was a digital arrangement tool so they could take all of the materials and contracts that are usually done in person and digitize them. It’s not a future direction we want to go in, but it was something easy to spin out to help.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias