Iteralix Raises a €100K Pre-seed Investment Round from Think Bigger Capital

If you’re seeking alternatives to a funeral, to help meet the needs a traditional funeral would cover, today’s blog post might be just for you. At Iteralix, they believe that memorial services should not be regarded as atypical celebrations of life. Their platform offers non-traditional but truly meaningful experiences in contrast to end-of-life services.

Q: Tell us about Iteralix 

Iteralix is a newborn startup aiming to change how people handle death. Its technology allows users to choose and design a meaningful experience as an alternative to a traditional funeral in a single platform.

Over 100 collaboration agreements with different service providers make it possible to offer roughly 60 meaningful experiences, across 30 cities in Spain, so far.

Those events have been entirely designed by Iteralix as a jumping off point to transform the unwelcoming and out of date funeral sector, adding extra value to the beloved ones once that someone passes away.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the founding team. How come you started in Demium and how has the incubation programme experience been so far?

After the pandemic, I quit my job to set my vision going. Even though my determination was strong, I was lacking the know-how, which is the reason why I joined Demium. 

The incubator selects the best talent rather than the best business ideas because they know that successful projects are carried out by great teams. This is precisely the greatest acknowledgment I have for the programme: the possibility to establish synergies with other fellow entrepreneurs, equally talented, who become your partners, in my case those were Valentina and Santi, whose connection with my initial idea was on-the-spot. They played a crucial role from the ideation phase to the definition of the final business model and took our startup to the next level.

Q: What was it like raising a round for the first time?  

It’s a mixture of excitement, joy and adaptive fear, due to the enormous responsibility this investment entails. But it goes beyond that, especially due to the feeling of self-realization when it turns out that an investment fund puts its trust on your team and yourself to build up from scratch a startup with such a needed value proposition.

At the beginning of the program, people will call you crazy for the kind of industry you would like to disrupt into, and then, a few months later, you are out there pitching to demonstrate how hard you've worked over the past few months, eyeing a very necessary fund round. 

Q: What will you focus your initial funding on? 

We could summarize it in just one word heightened by three: growth, growth and growth. Growth for us means not just keep adding mind-blowing events in different locations, but create a community around our brand, people that see how Iteralix disrupts the death care services industry and it is capable of changing the traditional paradigm.

To do so, with the initial funding we want to prioritize two aspects of our growth strategy to get product-market fit as soon as possible: technology, to keep improving our just released platform with different automations and marketing, in order to spread out the existence of a digital alternative to the traditional funerals and getting customers onboard.

Q: What’s next for Iteralix? 

Iteralix shapes the future with its revolutionary value proposition, therefore we do have an exciting journey ahead.

We are already working on new ways to keep up our singular disruption of the death care services industry, such as the possibility to organise your own alternative funeral in order to offer the loved ones a scheduled experience once the person has passed away. 

Q: What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs looking for first round funding?  

I would provide quite a few of them, but if I would have to focus on the most important ones, I would highlight the entrepreneur mindset. It’s the key point.

Being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle, we deal with risk, we are dreamers and we like to complicate our lives. If you don’t get an emotional connection with your project or you are building up something just with the idea of becoming rich, you will probably fail and investors notice this. 

You need to really prove your solution is able to solve real problems for other people, so don’t fall in love with your idea or product, don´t be stubborn but humble, get out of the building and listen to the market. 

Remember that at this stage, one of your most important assets is the team you are surrounded by, so seek cohesion,  focus on matters and convince investors about your vision and execution capacity.

Q: What role did Demium play in this first investment round?

In February 2021, Valentina, Santi and I were just three individuals wanting to change the world by creating a startup with high impact. We all signed up to one of the Demium AllStartUp weekends and we started to work as a team straight away. If we are the Iteralix parents, this makes Demium its grandparent. 

They provided us with a wide range of resources, the physical space to encourage dynamic learning and one of the most important assets, mentorship. I would like to specifically thank Nina Alastruey, who was fascinated from the beginning by our willingness to innovate in this particular industry and she provided us with a sense of structure and a vast know-how, both of which were decisive factors to prime us for success.