This architect designed a touching digital memorial platform for the post-burial age

The online service could help cemeteries reach new customers, and memorialize the lives of loved ones in a new way.

Alex Josephson was thinking about tombstones. It was early 2022 and he was sitting in a Toronto hospital room alongside his father, who was on the verge of dying from complications with COVID-19. “He said, listen, I bought plots in a cemetery and if I don’t get out of the ICU, this is what I want on my tombstone,” Josephson recalls.

The stark brevity of that task—summarizing a life on a block of stone—took Josephson aback. “I knew my father was more than just a date of birth and a date of potential death,” he says. “And I think everybody could say the same about their loved ones.”