Leicester insurance startup DeadHappy has entered administration.
On the 24th June joint administrators were appointed following an ominous notice on the DeadHappy website back in March saying the company could no longer accept new customers.
Licensed insolvency practitioners Adam Stephens and Kevin Ley of Evelyn Partners LLP are now working to ensure all customer policies transfer back to the insurers with “minimal interruption to customers”.
According to the latest filing on Companies House DeadHappy owe more than £1m to creditors, which include Channel Four (£35k) and Meta (£143k).
The firm which specialised in cheap and easy life insurance was formed in 2013 and at one point was valued at £35m after smashing its crowd funding targets.
However the startup had caused controversy in 2023 when they featured serial killer Harold Shipman on an ad, which saw more than 50 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
In 2019 a different DeadHappy ad was banned by the watchdog for appearing to trivialise suicide.
An accompanying site DeadUnhappy.com reads:
“Our insurance partners have told us we can’t accept new life insurance customers at the moment. We wish it was different, we believe it should be different, but unfortunately not everyone agrees.
“To all our existing customers please don’t worry, your policies are unaffected.”