Problem

Sunset addresses the administrative and financial blind spot that follows a death. Families and executors often have to reconstruct a loved one’s financial life across banks, retirement and investment accounts, insurance, property, vehicles, business interests, debts, and unclaimed-property databases. Hidden assets can delay probate, while beneficiary complications, valuation issues, and unpaid obligations can create further risk. The killer use case is a recently bereaved family that lacks a complete account list and needs to discover, claim, close, and distribute the estate without relying on scattered paperwork and institution-by-institution calls. The economic stakes are meaningful: missed assets can reduce what heirs recover, and even a single bank’s settlement process can take weeks.

Product / Service

Sunset is an online estate-settlement platform. A user provides information about the deceased, and Sunset searches thousands of public and private institutions, identifies possible matches, prepares the required paperwork, and helps the family claim what was found. The platform covers bank, retirement, investment, insurance, property, vehicle, business, debt, and unclaimed-property searches, and can generate county-specific probate documents across all 50 states and more than 3,000 counties, with online notarization available.

Once the user approves an action, Sunset helps notify institutions, close and transfer accounts, sell property, consolidate proceeds into an FDIC-insured estate account, and distribute the estate. Sunset says most assets are found within one business day to one week, although some bank confirmations can take up to two weeks. Family-facing tools are free with no subscription, upfront fee, or percentage of the inheritance; Sunset earns interest through banking partners while estate funds temporarily sit in the estate account. Professionals such as probate attorneys and fiduciaries can buy Sunset Pro, which starts at $500 per asset search and also offers monthly plans.

Market

Sunset competes in estate settlement and probate-administration software, with a fintech layer focused on discovering and moving financial assets. Its consumer users are families settling estates, while its professional market includes probate attorneys, licensed fiduciaries, trustees, and aftercare specialists. Adjacent alternatives include Estateably for estate and trust administration, Empathy for digital estate-planning and bereavement workflows, Alix for more hands-on estate coordination, and probate case-management tools such as Smokeball. Traditional probate counsel and manual searches through banks and government databases remain substitutes, particularly for complex or disputed estates.

The company appears post-launch rather than pre-revenue: it has a paid professional product and a bank-interest monetization model, although the available evidence does not disclose revenue or funding amounts. Sunset was founded in 2024, entered Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch, launched a beta before releasing its web app and expanded discovery features, and reports that it is trusted by more than 10,000 families nationwide. Those traction figures and operating metrics are primarily company-reported, but they indicate an active product with meaningful early consumer adoption rather than a purely pre-launch concept.