September 2020

Page A21 SEPTEMBER 2020 FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS S ec t i on A XL industries inc. Call: 406-449-4100 • Visit: www.XLIndustries.com Available Through Quality Suppliers Made in USA Quality & Value - Built Just for Funeral Homes! Providing the Best-Designed Tools for Your Services Since 1926. Dozens of products that give you years of service and store compactly when not in use. Lightweight and easy to take to gravesides or churches. Portable Folding Display Table Basket Stands “A” Floral Rack Nesting Stands Memorial Diamond Startup Eterneva adds $3M to Seed Round AUSTIN,TX— Grief well- ness and memorial dia- mond startup Eterneva raised an oversubscribed $3 million seed extension round led by Springdale Ventures. The Austin-based com- pany is a developer of di- amond technology that converts cremated ashes of loved ones into diamonds. Customers can personalize the diamonds’ size, color, cut and inscription. In addition to Spring- dale, 27 other individu- als and venture firms par- ticipated in the round, including new investors Next Coast Ventures, SoGal Ventures, Found- er Collective and Cap- star Ventures. Eterne- va previously raised $1.8 million in seed and angel rounds, both in 2019, ac- cording to Crunchbase data. With this new fund- ing, the company has raised a total of $4.8 mil- lion 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 labo- ratory in Austin where it grows the diamonds, as well as invest in its digital grief wellness experience around the memorial dia- monds. “A big part of our strate- gy is vertically integrating into other areas as well as building a much larger dia- mond lab facility in Austin so we can bring more and more growth in-house,” Archer said. “We are also evaluating our custom- er 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 lab- oratories in Germany and Switzerland, Archer 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 cus- tomers, and its celebration of life program and curated grief journey is being stud- ied by Baylor University . “The study speaks to the very core of who we are as a grief wellness brand,” Ar- cher said. “Folks are com- ing out the other side in a different place with their grief, so Baylor is study- ing 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 be- gan offering a free service to funeral homes and cre- matoriums to digitize all of their arrangement ma- terials in under 72 hours. In June, the company signed its second funer- al home partnership with Phaneuf Funeral Homes & Crematorium to of- fer those services in New Hampshire and Vermont. Eterneva also has a part- nership with Schoedinger Funeral Home and Cre- mation Services in Co- lumbus, OH. 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 ar- rangement tool so they could take all of the mate- rials and contracts that are usually done in person and digitize them. It’s not a fu- ture direction we want to go in, but it was something easy to spin out to help.”