From tending graves to raising €1.7 million: Memora sets out to modernise Europe’s cemeteries

Danish startup Memora has raised €1.7 million (DKK 13 million) to connect cemetery managers, gardeners and families through one platform, bringing together administration, maintenance and communication.

The round was led by venture capital firm True Collective. Chris Evans, formerly of Kahoot!, will also join the company as CTO in early 2027.

“I learned how much of the work that takes place in a cemetery is never seen by the families, and gained an understanding of both the gardeners’ daily routines and the needs of the families. Today, we develop the platform together with cemetery managers, gardeners and families, and their experiences are crucial to us,” says Johan Toft-Nielsen, founder and CEO of Memora.

While finding a direct or adjacent comparator is difficult, Memora’s funding can be placed alongside a series of European investments in digital end-of-life services and operational management software in 2026.

In Sweden, Solace Care raised €2.1 million to expand its digital platform for end-of-life planning and bereavement support, while Ireland-founded EstateMin secured €1 million for its AI-powered estate administration software. In Denmark, Copenhagen-based Cortas raised €1.47 million to develop its AI-native property management platform, while Cyprus-founded Piney secured €1.6 million for its rental property operations business.

EU-Startups has previously examined European DeathTech companies offering digital memorials and bereavement administration, providing an earlier reference point for Memora’s combination of cemetery operations and family communication.

“The opportunity isn’t just to replace paper with software,” adds Chris Evans, CTO at Kahoot!. “It’s to rethink how an entire industry operates, from the cemetery office to the people on the ground and the communities they serve. AI opens up possibilities that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. We’re building around those possibilities, not the limitations of yesterday’s systems.”

When Johan Toft-Nielsen founded Memora in 2022, the company sold grave maintenance directly to thousands of families. Its own gardeners cycled between cemeteries with backpacks and shovels while relatives followed the work in an app.

But doing the work themselves revealed a bigger opportunity: building better technology for the people running cemeteries.

Today, it is the cemeteries that purchase the platform, and their own gardeners who carry out the work. The solution has been developed in close collaboration with cemetery managers, gardeners and families.

Cemetery managers can plan and assign tasks, gardeners document work through their phones, and families receive photographs and community updates when graves are cared for. Families can also share memories of their loved ones through the platform.

Memora is already using AI to turn gardeners’ work into updates for families, reducing administrative effort while improving communication. The company is bringing modern technology, geospatial tooling and AI into an industry still dominated by manual processes.

“We invest in founders who earned their insight the hard way. Memora has turned former competitors into partners by listening to cemeteries and developing the solution together with them. The team has demonstrated its ability to turn those insights into a digital platform that cemeteries every day in their daily operations. Memora understands both daily life at the cemetery and the technology, and with Chris Evans on the team, Denmark is only the beginning,” says Rolf Pedersen, managing partner at True Collective.

With the new capital, Memora aims to bring its approach to cemeteries across Europe, where millions of grave plots are still managed through manual and fragmented systems.

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