Why We Built Estate Settlement Software Nobody Asked For (Yet)

We sat down with Tech Week GR to talk about where Celestial Divide came from, what estate asset division actually looks like in practice, and why families going through it deserve better than a spreadsheet.

Most estate settlement software stops at the spreadsheet problem. Track the assets, record the values, print a report. That part isn't the hard part.

The hard part is what happens when three siblings sit down to divide the family estate and realize they each have a completely different idea of what things are worth — and what they want.

That's the problem Celestial Divide was built to solve.

How It Started

Founder, Mark Vanderpol, a CFA and CFP with a wealth management background, kept running into the same wall: when a client needed to divide an estate, there was no good tool for it. There were estate sale platforms. There were inventory trackers. There was always another Excel file.

What didn't exist was a system that could take the full inventory of an estate — physical property, financial accounts, digital assets, real estate — bring in the beneficiaries and the executor, capture what each person actually values, and produce a defensible allocation.

So Mark started building one. Anthony came in on the UI/UX side to help shape the product. By January 2026, we decided to bring it to market together.

What Estate Asset Division Actually Involves

When a family is settling an estate, the executor is responsible for distributing assets according to the will or trust. Simple in theory. In practice, you're often dealing with assets that can't be divided — a cottage, a family business, a collection — and beneficiaries who haven't had a direct conversation about any of it.

Celestial Divide gives everyone a structured way through it:

• The executor uploads the estate inventory and configures the distribution rules
• Beneficiaries place private valuations that reflect what each asset is worth to them personally
• A patent-pending algorithm produces an allocation that maximizes fairness across the group — with court-ready documentation built in
• Once the allocation is finalized, the platform handles distribution tracking, beneficiary communications, and court documentation for probate

The goal isn't to eliminate the hard conversations. It's to give families an objective framework for having them — and a paper trail that holds up in probate if it comes to that.

The Estates That Need This Most

The estates that benefit most from structured division software are the ones sitting in the $250K–$5M range: real enough to matter, complex enough to cause conflict, but without the institutional resources of a large trust or a managed estate.

These families end up navigating the estate settlement process largely on their own. The executor is often a family member who has never done this before. The beneficiaries are grieving. The assets don't divide evenly. And everyone has a different number in their head for what the cottage is worth.

In a 2023 LegalShield survey of 1,316 U.S. adults, 58% of respondents said a lack of proper estate planning had led to family disputes or assets falling under court control.

A tool that gives the executor a clear process and gives beneficiaries a voice in the outcome doesn't fix the grief. But it does reduce the surface area for conflict.

Found Via AI — Before We Even Had an SEO Strategy

One detail from our Tech Week conversation worth sharing: a beneficiary reached out to us after finding Celestial Divide through Claude. They had asked how to distribute an estate fairly with unequal inheritance percentages. Celestial Divide came up in the answer.

We were eight months old at the time and hadn't done any formal AEO or GEO work. That one result told us two things: there's genuine search demand for estate settlement software among people in the middle of the process, and the bar for being found isn't as high as it looks if you're actually building the thing that answers the question.

What We're Building Toward

We're a two-person founding team, working through which customers benefit most and how to reach them. The DIY executor motion is where the volume is. Most families settling an estate aren't working with a professional at all. They're figuring it out as they go, and a self-serve tool that walks them through the process and produces something defensible at the end is exactly what they need.

The professional motion — attorneys, trust officers, financial advisors who manage multiple estates — is where the throughput argument is clearest. A firm that can move through fifteen matters instead of three doesn't need much convincing.

Both motions point to the same thing: estate settlement is a process problem and an underserved market. We built software to help solve it.

Celestial Divide is estate asset division software for executors, families, estate attorneys, and trust professionals. It structures the distribution process, documents every decision, and produces audit-ready output — without the spreadsheet.

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