Bestow’s Path to Building the Unified Platform for the Life Insurance Industry

In 2018 my co-founder Jonathan and I went all in on a contestable idea: to prove that getting life insurance didn’t have to be a painful, months-long ordeal. We built Bestow as a consumer-facing solution, taking lessons from the world of digital convenience and applying them to a trillion-dollar industry that was largely stuck in the past.

We went deep in our approach, building our own application, underwriting, binding and administration platform from scratch, effectively developing the first vertical software platform in the life insurance industry in the past two decades. As we went to market and sold directly to consumers and through fintech partners and agents, carriers started noticing. They saw what we were doing and, more importantly, they saw what was possible. 

Since then, our mission—to make life insurance more accessible to consumers—hasn’t changed, but our go to market path has evolved. We realized the biggest impact we could have was to expand the use of our technology by making the platform we had initially built ourselves available to other carriers.

Smith Point Capital’s Brooke Kiley Slattery (co-lead of our $120M Series D with Goldman Sachs) captures the spirit of this shift perfectly:

“[Bestow] has secured partnerships with some of the insurance industry's most respected names… This demonstrates the company's ability to build trust in an exceptionally challenging environment. Unlike other insurance technology platforms, Bestow offers a comprehensive vertical software solution purpose-built for the entire life insurance value chain.”

The Problem We Set Out to Solve

What we found as we met with carriers was an industry constrained by decades of fragmentation. Many still rely on an amalgamation of point solutions, software products built in isolation to solve a single, narrow problem such as quoting platforms, underwriting engines, distribution tools, and policy admin systems that were never built to talk to one another. The result?

Data Silos, Not Solutions: These tools function well on their own, but they were intentionally built not to seamlessly share data or workflows. These often brittle, incomplete data pipelines grant carriers limited visibility into the agent and customer journey, underwriting data, and post issue interactions, robbing them of critical insights for growth.

Corporate Inertia: When a carrier wants to launch or refresh a new product or enter a new channel, their tech stack can prove to be either friend or foe. Updates often must move through layers of disconnected systems. Even a simple improvement can take months of coordination, assuming no unexpected disruptions occur, particularly when they have to work across an array of disconnected vendors and providers.

A Painful User Experience: Without a unified backend, customers and agents face disjointed application processes, delays in policy issuance, and inconsistent servicing experiences. On the front end, poor UI leads to clunky experiences and purchase friction. In today’s digital market, this isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a strategic liability that makes agents and advisors look to other carriers who may be further along in their modernization efforts.

Enter Bestow 

We proved the only way to break through this technological paralysis was to replace fragmentation with a single, strategically unified platform—not by layering more tools on top, but by rethinking the core tech stack's interoperability.

Our platform provides integrated, end-to-end functionality across the entire policy lifecycle. While we gained initial traction for term life ourselves; we’ve now partnered with some of the most innovative carriers in the industry proving the value of our technology to support every major product across term and permanent life products. Some examples:

• We helped a top 20 life insurance provider launch an intuitive, frictionless digital application, leading to a 200+% increase in conversion rates and dropping application submission times to just 5 minutes.
• We helped a large carrier launch a final expense product in just 7 months—a process that normally takes over a year. The new product also eliminated a critical friction point for agents and customers with instant underwriting decisions for 100% of applications.
• By leveraging Bestow’s Recommendation Engine to analyze traffic, our carrier partner was able to reduce underwriting costs by 22% and costs per submitted application by 22%.

Our Secret Sauce: Partnerships Built on In-Market Learnings

Bestow is not a traditional monolithic system. It’s modular, flexible, and designed to evolve. We work in concert with internal carrier teams to convert manual processes to digital, accelerating the time it takes for a potential customer to get a decision. This ability to speed up the build and test-to-market timeline is a huge unlock for our partners.

Our approach stands alone because it's intentionally shaped by what we learned in our days selling policies about what works, what doesn't, and what people actually want from transactional life products. We are deeply invested in solving the engineering, data, and operational challenges of our carrier partners in a seamless and scalable way.

For carriers, Bestow’s platform is more than a streamlined alternative to point solution purgatory. It is an engine of business transformation. 

The real adventure is ahead. Having laid the foundation for our core platform, our team is now focused on what's next: expanding our capabilities to serve the full spectrum of products in the life and annuity space. With the recent launch of IUL and additional whole life products and a robust slate of innovative features in our pipeline, we're committed to a future where our platform is the essential engine driving the industry forward.