Kate Ivanova

From 2023 to 2025, Ivanova worked at the pathology AI company HistAI. Looking back on her personal website, she said the team set out to advance cancer diagnostics with AI and along the way built a large pathology dataset and annotation pipelines and released open foundation models; she described the effort as having “failed halfway.” HistAI describes itself as providing pathology foundation models, whole slide images, and tools for digital pathology and cancer research.⁠[1][2]

On June 7, 2024, as Ekaterina Ivanova, she posted the paper “Hibou: A Family of Foundational Vision Transformers for Pathology” on arXiv with Dmitry Nechaev and Alexey Pchelnikov, all three listing HistAI as their affiliation. In 2025 the three published a paper introducing the SPIDER multi-organ pathology dataset, and on May 17, 2025 they posted a paper presenting HISTAI, an open-source, large-scale whole slide image dataset.⁠[3][2][4]

In 2025, Ivanova co-founded Pantio with Dmitry Korzhov, who serves as chief executive officer. Pantio uses AI to recreate a deceased person’s voice, personality, and memories so that families can converse with the digital persona by voice or text. A profile hosted by Pantio calls her a “second-time founder” with a background in AI and digital health and names HistAI as her previous company.⁠[1][5][6][7]

As of February 2026, Pantio had about 100 paying families and followed a B2B2C model that serves families through partners such as funeral businesses rather than selling directly to consumers. Ivanova served as Pantio’s chief operating officer, leading partnerships with funeral homes and families and its network of deathcare partners. She said that families gathering and sharing memories of the deceased can be therapeutic in itself, and that pre-need customers were among Pantio’s fastest-growing segments.⁠[5][8]

On her personal website she said Pantio aimed to approach grief and the funeral space thoughtfully, while acknowledging that she “learned some hard lessons.”⁠[1]

In 2026, Ivanova began building Good Place, serving as co-founder and chief executive officer. On her personal website she summarized the plan as “buy a funeral home, make it good, repeat,” aiming for better spaces, clearer choices, and goodbyes that reflect the person who died.⁠[1][9]

Good Place describes itself as the first “AI native” death care company and plans to acquire funeral homes and run them on a single AI platform that drives demand, coordinates operations, and improves economics, giving funeral directors more time for families; it envisions fixing operations first, then rebuilding the service experience, and eventually expanding nationally under one brand. The company lists a four-person team, with members responsible for M&A, creative direction, and technology, and an office in San Francisco, California.⁠[9]

In September 2026, Good Place released a draft white paper titled “Can a funeral home be more human and profitable?” In it, Ivanova said she came into death care through technology and, after working with families, funeral directors, operators, and advisors, concluded that the opportunity was to “rebuild the funeral company from inside.” The paper says the company chose to own and operate funeral homes rather than sell software so that it could change workflows, staffing, pricing, and service together, and that it plans to improve a first home before testing whether the lessons transfer to more locations.⁠[10][9]

On October 23, 2026, Ivanova posted on X the second episode of a video series on “building an ai-native funeral company in public.” In the post she said that only 18% of funeral homes post prices online and that about eight in ten families call a single funeral home before committing to a decision of about $8,000, questioning why the industry still runs on phone calls.⁠[11]

The same day, she wrote on X that she had been criticized for “monetizing grief” while building AI avatars in the death care space and still faced similar accusations after turning to changing funeral homes.⁠[12]

Personal website: Public link: https://katherineivanova.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ivanidze404 (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-i-0271b4205/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Good Place: Official website: https://goodplacefuneral.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Pantio: Official website: https://pantio.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

HistAI: Official website: https://hist.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]