A quiet crisis is emerging. As baby boomers age, annual deaths in the United States will rise by nearly 20 percent, totaling about 75 million deaths between now and 2045, not including natural disasters or future pandemics.
Only 15,400 funeral homes operate in the U.S. today, many run by an aging workforce using tools that haven’t changed in decades.
If nothing shifts, we’re headed toward a collapse that mirrors COVID times: cities begging food distributors for refrigerated trailers, hospitals lining parking lots with makeshift morgues, and public cemeteries forced into trench burials when capacity breaks.
This will become a global crisis unless we build infrastructure to match the demand that will occur over the next 2 decades.
This is a Capacity Issue.
Demand for cremation and burial services is climbing far faster than the infrastructure built to handle it. Cremation rates alone have risen from 32% in 2005 to over 60% today, and are projected to reach nearly 80% by 2045, yet facility growth has barely moved.
This is a Financial Issue.
Dying is expensive.The median funeral now runs $8,000–$10,000, while 37% of Americans cannot cover a $400 emergency expense. Rising death rates magnify that gap. At the same time, private equity is consolidating funeral homes to capture wealth-transfer revenue, not improve care.
We envision a future where nobody has to post a go fund me for their loved one’s funeral. Robotics and emerging death-tech makes that possible.
These are just a few of the thousands of families asking for help on GoFundMe.
Our Solution: A Three-Tier Robotic Funeral Model
Derci proposes an (almost) fully autonomous solution to the “deathboom.” We merge robotics, AI, deathcare, and hospitality to ease capacity strain while redesigning the deathcare process to match changing cultural demands.
Layer 1: Human Interface
Human-to-human contact is essential in any form of care work, especially deathcare.
The roles that shape the funeral experience include communication, coordination, hospitality, sales, and care work, all fields where women have historically dominated and where AI is already replacing jobs at the fastest rates. Just because AI can automate these functions does not mean it should in moments of grief.
Derci treats this as a structural opportunity: redirecting women and other historically marginalized workers who are being displaced by automation into a sector where their relational, administrative, and emotional skills are not only relevant but essential. They already know how to do this work, we simply give them a stable, upwardly mobile place to do it.
Layer 3: Robotic Back-of-House System
Layer 3 handles all physical tasks that involve remains through robotics, mechanized systems, and new forms of disposition technology. This layer removes the health, safety, and psychological burden from human workers and creates a cleaner, more consistent, and more scalable operational model. It incorporates robotic handling, automated preparation, and emerging technologies like Aquamation to expand capacity and reduce environmental impact.
Uses robotic embalmers and automated preparation systems that move, wash, lift, and position remains with precision and full chain-of-custody tracking.
Operates autonomous or semi-autonomous transfer vehicles that perform pickups from hospitals, homes, and care facilities and log every movement.
Integrates cost-effective aquamation units to provide a greener, lower-energy, lower-emission alternative to traditional flame cremation with reduced equipment costs over time.
Layer 3 creates a scalable physical backbone that supports higher case volume, safer working conditions, and cleaner environmental outcomes while keeping humans in the roles that depend on emotional care.
Layer 2: AI & LLM Based Admin
any admin and any non-manual front of house work goes through a single system that captures information, automates paperwork, and keeps every case compliant with state requirements.
It reads hospital documents, ID scans, and coroner notes and builds a complete record without manual entry. It generates permits and certificates, schedules staff and vehicles, updates families, and checks every file for accuracy before submission.
Examples of what the platform handles (California):
Completes the California death certificate by extracting required fields and checking them against Health and Safety Code §102875.
Creates the Permit for Disposition of Human Remains and verifies that all county registrar requirements are met before filing.
Produces a compliant cremation authorization, validates the authorizing agent, and confirms all signatures required under California cremation law.
This is an Environmental Issue.
Cremation is often marketed as a greener choice, but each flame cremation emits: 400–600 pounds of CO₂, along with nitrogen oxides (NOₓ), sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and the release of mercury vapor from dental amalgam.
Burial is not environmentally neutral either: it consumes large amounts of urban land, requires caskets made from steel, hardwood, and concrete, and depends on embalming fluids that contain formaldehyde, methanol, and glutaraldehyde, all of which leach into soil over time.
While Derci will initially support all disposition methods, because capacity failures create far greater environmental and public-health harm than any single practice, we also introduce pathways that significantly reduce impact.
Aquamation is an existing cremation alternative which carries a 90 percent lower carbon footprint. Over time, we aim to redefine burial rituals to be more inclusive, customizable and expand access to other environmentally responsible options.
Our model includes mobile aquamation units for disaster relief and heat-wave events along the Sun Belt. Aging populations and climate volatility will produce acute spikes in mortality. With the right regulatory modernization, these mobile units can prevent overcrowded morgues.
Derci positions environmental stewardship not as an add-on but as the operational backbone of a modern, scalable death-care system.
Photo above is one of our early ideations on how to solve spikes in demand, possible mobile solutions.
Automation is a gendered issue.
Deathcare is hitting a capacity gap, where case volume is rising faster than facilities and staff can keep up. At the same time, women in admin, communication, and care roles are facing an AI-driven displacement wave. Derci solves both by automating the back-of-house and creating safe, front-of-house roles that let women lead operations without the direct handling of human remains.
AI & Robotic automation is set to displace roles where women workers are concentrated: care, communication, administrative support. These are the undervalued sectors that make modern economies run, and they are the first to be absorbed by AI systems trained on global patterns of extraction.
As these workers lose ground in traditional employment pathways, the deathcare industry becomes one of the few remaining spaces where human presence is irreplaceable.
Derci’s model intentionally channels that displacement into opportunity, creating front-of-house roles designed for women and BIPOC workers and eventually giving them a path to own and operate their own locations through mentoring, training, and franchise.