After Cremation Services, a startup based in Provo, Utah, recently raised $1 million in a pre-seed round to help the company scale up its direct cremation services and build out its online platform.
After is up and running, currently offering cremation services in Utah, but the company’s first market was Maricopa County, where two of the company’s co-founders call home.
Direct cremation is when a family directly coordinates the removal and cremation of a loved one. After is one of several direct cremation companies that aims to streamline, and remove costs from, the cremation process.
A standard cremation from After in Maricopa County, including the removal, cremation and return of the remains plus paperwork, costs $695. From death to return of the remains, the entire process is typically complete in under two weeks. A traditional funeral and burial typically costs thousands.
Jackson Buntrock, one of After’s three co-founders, said they saw an opportunity after noticing a general lack of innovation in the funeral industry.
“There's a lot of innovation happening with what to do with your cremated remains or things like that, but as far as actually caring for the individuals and optimizing and making that process more efficient and better for families, we just didn't see a lot of innovation there and felt like we had a good opportunity,” he said.
Bryce Bunker, a fellow After co-founder, has a more specific expertise that led him to the company.
“I'm a fourth generation funeral director. So I have lived and breathed the funeral space my entire life,” Bunker said. “We as an industry kind of have this one size fits all approach which really didn't work well for consumers. So as with every, I think good company, it starts with a problem that needs to be solved.”
Bunker still works with his family’s funeral home, Bunker Family Funerals & Cremation, which has two locations in Mesa, in addition to helping build After.
After was founded in November 2020 and officially started cremation services in January of this year.
Raising capital
The $1 million pre-seed round was led by Ten13 Capital, a firm based in Queensland, Australia. Most of the funding will be used on marketing and content creation, which Buntrock said is designed to help After stand out from competitors.
“Having a lower cost option for cremation isn't necessarily a novel idea in and of itself, there are other low-cost cremation providers all throughout the United States,” he said. “Our whole plan is to provide as much value to families and to customers as we can.”
Specifically, After will make content around grief support (which they call Aftercare) to help people deal with losing a loved one by helping people settle their affairs, like closing credit card accounts or insurance policies.
After also plans on expanding into two new markets within the next six months — likely Las Vegas and Idaho — with the goal of operating in at least 20 markets in the next two years.
Finding the target
Buntrock said the young company is still figuring out exactly who its target customers are, but so far the company has worked with people from a variety of ages and demographic groups.
He said most of After’s customers are prearranging services and are in their late 50s and early 60s, slightly younger than the industry average. Buntrock, who oversees the prearranging side of the business, said they’ve had even younger customers as well; He said he recently spoke to a single woman in her 30s about setting up cremation services for herself.
“The ability to have somebody be able to do this online or over the phone or in 20 minutes or less, I think is really appealing to a younger demographic,” he said.
Regardless of age, the After team understands that it works with people during a very sensitive time and that caring for the living is just as important as caring for the dead.
“That's what's so powerful about After is, I don't think that anybody in the affordable cremation space has really taken the time or had the resources to build out a platform to really make a significant difference in the life of those families that they're serving and caring for,” Bunker said. “That's where the great opportunity is for us.”
