Europe’s cemeteries care for places, records, and relationships spanning generations, yet much of their daily work still relies on paper, spreadsheets, and disconnected software. Memora’s platform runs day-to-day operations for close to 100,000 grave plots already, connecting cemetery managers, gardeners, and families through one platform that brings together administration, maintenance, and communication.

When Johan Toft-Nielsen founded Memora in 2022, the company sold grave maintenance directly to thousands of families, with its own gardeners cycling 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.

“For the first six months, I was the one traveling around the country with a rake and watering can. 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,”

said Johan Toft-Nielsen, founder and CEO.

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, as well as share memories of their loved ones through the platform.

Chris Evans, CTO at Kahoot! and previously Drops, will join Memora as CTO in 2027, bringing experience building and scaling international technology platforms. Memora is already using AI to turn gardeners’ work into updates for families, reducing administrative effort while improving communication, and is bringing modern technology, geospatial tooling, and AI into an industry still dominated by manual processes.

“The opportunity isn’t just to replace paper with software. 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,”

said Chris Evans.

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.

“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 use 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,”

said Rolf Pedersen, managing partner at True Collective.

Read the entire post here: Six Months With a Rake and Watering Can Taught Him the Cemetery Business – Now His Startup Memora Has Raised €1.7 Million to Take On Europe