This startup wants to turn your dead loved ones into trees

We get a lot of pitches here at TNW, but none of them caught our attention as much as the Bios Incube. This device – and the people behind it – want to turn your cold, dead body – or even the mortal remains of a friend or loved one – into a lovely tree.

The team, based in Barcelona, Spain have already come up with a biodegradable urn. But now they’ve built a plant management system that will, in theory at least, turn ashes into plant food.

According to the company’s Kickstarter page, you simply pick your tree of choice, add some soil to the Incube, fill it with water, dump your dead friend in the middle, place a sensor over the top and it does the rest.

You can then follow all the action on your smartphone via the company’s app as it shows the development of the sapling via a series of vital statistics.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The Bios Incube has been designed for city dwellers with limited access to natural land, those seeking an alternative to traditional burials, and for people who want to meaningfully connect with their loved ones who have passed away.

The sensor on top that measures soil moisture, conductivity, temperature, humidity and how much sunlight the tree is receiving. Once it calculates all of that, it then distributes water from the three gallon tank underneath. You’ll then have to top the whole thing up once every 20 days.

Once the sapling has grown to a suitable size you can either plant it in a destination of your choice or keep the whole thing close to you.

Are you as freaked out/as fascinated by this concept as we are? Of course, people have buried their loved ones beneath trees, that’s nothing new.

But the idea of throwing a whole bunch of tech at the concept of death/rebirth/reincarnation/turning your relatives into plant food via a smartphone app just has the whole team at TNW going, “huh?”