The funeral services comparator Funos will enter the Mexican market

The Catalan funeral services startup Funos will enter the Mexican market this year to begin its expansion in Latin America. The marketplace of funeral companies, which functions as a tracker and comparator of services and prices for burials and mourning ceremonies, is already negotiating with the four main funeral companies operating in Mexico.

The founder and director of Funos, Marc Vallhonesta, states that it is a reasoned decision after detecting that the portal has very good positioning and traffic of visits in that country. "The launch is scheduled for mid-this year," he specifies and explains that it will be accompanied by the launch of a financing round aimed at business angels, some crowdfunding platform, and "we will probably have a participatory loan from Enisa".

The entry into the foreign market takes place after starting 2022 with 90,000 web visits and 250,000 page views of the portal that he created at the end of 2020, when the pandemic collapsed his previous business, Partyo. It was an online marketplace to hire services related to private parties such as venues, catering, entertainment, or decorations.

Now, with the Funos platform fully operational and its business growing, Vallhonesta will expand the number of supplier companies of the marketplace in Spain to about twenty. Thanks to the entry of the offer of funeral services from Madrid and Valencia, during the first quarter of this year, to later incorporate companies from cities such as Seville or Malaga.

The expansion to cover all of Spain is a natural growth, given that many funeral homes already have national reach, although the services and prices they offer vary greatly depending on the area of the territory where the burial is to take place. What is missing to complete Funos' online services is to have the most local companies as providers. And that is what Vallhonesta and his team of six people and half a dozen external collaborators are working on.

The founder of Funos states that the addition of more funeral homes is essential to "democratize this sector". "The problem we solve for our clients is always the same and the services of funeral homes are very similar everywhere," he specifies.

"Culturally, each country performs funerals differently, but what's important, more than how the ceremony and the grieving space are, is that the user lacks information about what they should do, what services they can have, at what price... There is information asymmetry towards the user who needs this service at a very complex time and, moreover, in a painful situation where they must resolve many things and with very little time," he argues.

Entering insurance

Likewise, Funos has detected through inquiries on its portal that there is a significant number of people looking for information about death insurance policies available in the market. "These are especially users of a certain age who do not have a death policy, but who want to plan their funeral and, specifically, have it paid for so that their family does not have problems when they pass away and have to bury or cremate them."

Therefore, the next natural step for Funos' growth will be the development of a death insurance comparator, Vallhonesta anticipates. In Spain, he explains, death insurance policies only have a market penetration of 45%, "therefore, more than half of the population does not have coverage and there is a very large growth potential."

Users also demand a death insurance price comparator

On the other hand, there are funeral homes that already offer advance payment, non-nominative and in installments, for what can be a complete funeral service, for those people who do not want traditional insurance, but who "want to have their death planned."