Just months af­ter pros­e­cu­tors al­leged a Google se­cu­rity en­gi­neer turned con­fi­den­tial search data into a $1.2 mil­lion pre­dic­tion-mar­ket side hus­tle, ven­ture-backed startup Tickr an­nounced Tuesday that it is bring­ing the same spirit of dis­eased op­por­tunism to death it­self with a new plat­form for trad­ing “obituary fu­tures” on celebri­ties, politi­cians, and other med­ically in­ter­est­ing pub­lic fig­ures. The app, which looks like Robinhood if Robinhood had spent a week­end huff­ing formalde­hyde, al­lows users to buy Yes or No con­tracts on whether a pub­lic fig­ure will die within a given win­dow, then track their po­si­tions on a sleek dash­board fea­tur­ing im­plied prob­a­bil­ity, so­cial chat­ter, and a bright red tab la­beled “Catalysts.”

Tickr founder and CEO Payne Doppan, a for­mer prod­uct lead at two gam­bling star­tups and one med­i­ta­tion app and VP at Meta, said the com­pany is merely “unlocking price dis­cov­ery for mor­tal­ity,” adding that death has re­mained “a trag­i­cally in­ef­fi­cient in­for­ma­tion mar­ket for too long.” Users can browse themed watch­lists in­clud­ing “Legacy Act in Danger,” “Election-Year Natural Causes,” and “Pope Quarterly,” then re­fine trades with pre­mium data lay­ers such as hos­pi­tal pa­parazzi sight­ings, skipped pub­lic ap­pear­ances, le­gal-de­part­ment-drafted fam­ily state­ments, and what the com­pany calls “face color mo­men­tum.” A leaked in­vestor memo de­scribes the prod­uct as “Bloomberg Terminal for hu­man ex­pi­ra­tion,” not­ing that user re­ten­tion spikes dra­mat­i­cally when­ever a beloved ac­tor can­cels tour dates or a sen­a­tor is pho­tographed near a stair­case. The memo also out­lines an ex­pan­sion roadmap for un­tapped bet­ting mar­kets such as first men­stra­tion and ad­dic­tion re­lapses.

Tickr said it has raised $48 mil­lion in seed fund­ing from a syn­di­cate of crypto funds, sports-bet­ting alumni, and at least one per­son who’s fa­ther lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “People say this is ghoul­ish,” said one backer on con­di­tion of anonymity be­cause he is still try­ing to sit on hos­pi­tal boards. “But so was short­ing the hous­ing mar­ket, and that guy got a movie.” The startup says it has al­ready signed part­ner­ship deals with newslet­ter writ­ers, pod­cast­ers, and sev­eral AI firms that will gen­er­ate “scenario-adjusted mor­tal­ity fore­casts” by scrap­ing in­ter­views for cough­ing fits and mea­sur­ing how of­ten a celebri­ty’s team uses the phrase “tired but in good spir­its.”