EverSettled raises $5M to automate the painful process of probate

When you lose a loved one, admin should be the last thing on your mind.

Yet, cruelly, this simply isn’t the reality for millions of families around the world.

At the most catastrophic moment of their life, families are handed an incredibly stressful second job, one that’s notoriously convoluted, opaque and utterly ill-matched to the realities of grief: managing the process of probate. 

The average estate takes over a year to settle, involves dozens of institutions that don’t talk to each other, and consumes an estimated 3–7% of the estate’s value in fees and costs. Executors are usually a grieving spouse or child with no legal training. They are expected to navigate courts, banks, insurers, and tax authorities largely alone. It is one of the last major life processes that technology has barely touched.

Today, EverSettled announces their $5M Seed round to help families across the U.S. navigate estate settlement with less confusion, cost and burden. 

The round was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from us at Seedcamp alongside Bridge Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Entrepreneurs First and Transpose Platform. Here’s why we invested.

Probate is, at its core, a coordination problem: documents to gather, forms to complete, deadlines to track, institutions to chase. It’s exactly the kind of problem AI excels at solving. 

AI also changes who this market can serve. Estate settlement has traditionally depended on large, manual back offices, which is why meaningful support has been a white-glove service reserved for the wealthy. Collapsing the cost with AI means that real help becomes affordable for the average family for the first time.

This is the future that EverSettled is building. Families are guided through estate settlement with an easy-to-use checklist, supported by Sage, the company’s AI probate assistant. Sage answers the questions that keep people up at night, 24/7, and takes action on their behalf.

Because settlement often takes a village, families can work through the process together on the platform, reducing the miscommunication that so often flares up into family disputes.

Underneath, the team is building safe, accurate agentic systems that take on more of the administrative burden over time: from cancelling subscriptions and finding lost assets to managing debts and, eventually, settling an estate end-to-end, across all 50 states. 

And it’s working: just four months in, EverSettled are already supporting thousands of families across the US. 

Work this important demands a founding team with the utmost sensitivity and dedication. Few are better matched than the team behind EverSettled.  

CEO Arum Kempster has experienced this problem first-hand. When she suddenly lost her father, settling his estate consumed 18 months of her life and roughly 900 hours of admin, nearly cost her the family home, and all of it while grieving and holding down a full-time job. She has also spent her career in this space, having previously written death policy at a national level.

When she and CTO Jacob Effenberger met at Entrepreneurs First, their very first conversation was about how brutal it had been to settle their own family members’ affairs. Before writing a line of code, they spoke to over 170 families, estate attorneys, paralegals and fiduciaries – and spent weeks sitting in San Francisco Probate Court, to understand exactly where the process breaks down. Jacob brings the technical foundation, having spent his career bringing technology to the death care industry. That compassion and seriousness is built into every corner of the product.

Arum and Jacob are also part of a pattern we know well: British and European founders taking on massive markets from San Francisco. Seedcamp backs exceptional founders tackling huge, foundational problems, and US probate, the world’s largest and most fragmented estate market, is exactly that. As our Principal Will Bennett puts it:

“Despite managing to chat about just about everything except the business in our process, we’re delighted that Arum Kempster and Jacob Effenberger decided to accept the Seedcamp offer to invest. Arum and Jacob are yet another example of maestro UK x Europe x Seedcamp founders building in San Francisco.”

Ultimately, though, our conviction comes down to trust. Trust earned in a moment of crisis is extraordinarily durable. The financial services industry spends billions acquiring and retaining customers through products and pricing; EverSettled earns it in a fundamentally different way, by showing up and offering a real service during the most vulnerable moment of a family’s life. 

That kind of relationship cannot be easily replicated – and it creates the foundation for a long-term financial relationship that traditional institutions simply cannot manufacture.

That is exactly what Arum and Jacob are building. We’re proud to back them, and the whole EverSettled team.