Rhan Choudhry, founder and CEO of Chptr
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Rehan Choudry, founder and CEO of Chptr. We discussed how his company provides a unique communications service of value for families and funeral homes.
What is Chptr and what services do you provide?
Chptr is a B2B platform that connects community storytelling with local broadcast media. We specialize in creating, distributing, and broadcasting memorials and death notices. Our platform helps funeral homes share these stories with their communities through trusted media outlets.
So Chptr provides a bridge for obituary news between funeral homes and broadcast media in their local markets?
Yes, Chptr serves as a bridge by allowing funeral homes to seamlessly share obituaries and memorial content with broadcast media in their local markets. This creates a streamlined process where meaningful stories reach a broader audience, ensuring community members can stay informed about important life events.
Can individual families utilize your services?
My core belief is that the funeral director is a critically necessary part of the equation for the bereaved. As such, we have built Chptr to primarily operate through partnerships with funeral homes. Through our partners, families can share personal stories with their communities in a meaningful and professional way. That said, we will always help a family if they come to us directly, but will often recommend one of our partner funeral homes.
Weddings and funerals are the two biggest life cycle events. How do you work with both kinds of events?
We create tailored solutions for both weddings and funerals. For weddings, we partner with venues and planners to produce celebratory announcements for local broadcast media. For funerals, we collaborate with funeral homes to broadcast personalized memorials, ensuring that stories of loved ones are respectfully shared with the community. At their core, both forms of storytelling are remarkably similar, though clearly under very different circumstances. We tailor our service approach to the bereaved to ensure extra care is given, but other (non-EOL) audiences benefit from that extra attention.
Map of USA locations with Chptr.
What broadcasters and funeral/cremation companies is Chptr currently working with? How many markets are currently involved?
We are actively collaborating with Sinclair Broadcast, Gray Television, Hearst, The Boston Globe, InsideNOVA, the Local Media Consortium, and many more. On the EOL side, we are partnered with incredible organizations like Foundation Partners, and are connected to over 400 funeral homes nationwide.
How did you come up with this business idea?
The idea for Chptr emerged from recognizing the need for better storytelling around life’s major events. I discovered this need by watching my wife, an Emmy-Award winning news anchor in New York City, tell the stories of the early COVID victims in New York. We saw an opportunity to modernize how memorials and celebrations are shared by bridging the gap between families, local businesses, and trusted media outlets in their communities.
What feedback have you received from families and funeral homes who have used Chptr’s services?
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Families appreciate having a meaningful platform to honor loved ones, while funeral homes find value in extending their services beyond traditional memorial formats. Funeral homes benefit in a big way from the additional reach they get by having their logo on broadcasted death notices. Media partners recognize the importance of sharing these personal stories with their audiences.
What are your goals for Chptr?
Our primary goal is to help as many bereaved communities as we can and, in the process, become the leading platform for life-event storytelling in local communities. We aim to expand our market presence, strengthen partnerships with media outlets and life-event businesses, and enhance our platform’s features to better serve families and communities.
What else should people know about Chptr?
We have built an incredible video solution that can help support individuals, families, and businesses in ways we haven’t begun scratching the surface on. We are always open to having creative conversations with people to see how Chptr can better support them. It’s the benefit of being an early startup — we can be incredibly nimble and creative in the ways we partner.
For more details, read this story in Kates Boylston’s Funeral Service Insider.
Author Gail Rubin, pioneering death educator, Certified Thanatologist and The Doyenne of Death, hosts the TV series Mortality Movies.