Life Insurance Technology at Scale: Bestow's 2025 Year in Review

As I reflect on 2025, I'm struck by how much we accomplished together with our carrier customers. This was the year we proved that speed and scale don't have to come at the expense of quality or innovation. In fact, they can reinforce each other. Here are some achievements we’re most proud of.

Lightning-fast product launches: Transamerica's IUL in record time

One of the highlights of the year was launching Financial Foundation IUL II Express with Transamerica. What made this particularly meaningful wasn't just that we delivered a new indexed universal life product, but that we did it in just a few months, from concept to launch.

IUL is one of the fastest-growing product categories in the market right now, and carriers need to be able to move quickly to capitalize on that demand. This launch demonstrated that modern life insurance technology can keep pace with market opportunities, allowing carriers to strike while the iron is hot. That’s the beauty of a cloud-based life insurance platform.

Innovation that scales across our entire customer base

What excites me most about our platform approach is that innovation for one customer often benefits many. Throughout 2025, we introduced product enhancements and features that address real market needs and fundamentally expand what's possible in digital life insurance distribution.

• Broader distribution strategies, including agent drop ticket experiences that let carriers meet agents and advisors where they are and support hybrid distribution models.
• New policy structures like parent owners and third-party payors, opening up juvenile products, giving families more flexibility in how they structure coverage.
• True 50-state replacement capabilities, removing a common friction point in the sales process.
• Enhanced underwriting tools, with workbench improvements that give underwriters better visibility and control.
• Multipolicy capabilities, because many households have a need for multiple products.

These are some of the major highlights, but the truth is our stellar engineering, product, and development teams pushed nearly 60 enhancements or new features into production this year, averaging more than one per week.

Each of these features represents hundreds of hours of collaborative work with our carrier customers to understand their unique needs and build solutions that work at scale.

Scaling service without sacrificing satisfaction

Here's something I'm particularly proud of: our TPA team.

As product demand grew in 2025, so did the volume of calls, questions, and support requests from agents and applicants. That's the reality of scale. More volume means more touchpoints, more complexity, and more opportunities for bottlenecks or drop offs.

But our team didn't just keep up. They excelled. They fielded hundreds of thousands of calls this year, ensuring that agents could keep moving prospects smoothly through the funnel and that applicants got the support they needed at critical moments in their buying journey.

The result? We maintained an NPS customer satisfaction score that's at least 2x the industry average for life insurance. That's not easy to do at scale, and it's a testament to the caliber of people on our service team and the technology and systems we've built to support them.

$120 million in new funding: betting on the future

In Q2, we closed a $120 million funding round co-led by Goldman Sachs and Smith Point Capital. This funding has allowed us to expand our product offering, further invest in R&D, and broaden the ways we support new and existing customers.

While we're grateful for the resources to continue building, this wasn’t just about capital. It was validation. Validation that the market believes a better future for life insurance technology is not only possible, but inevitable. And that Bestow is the company positioned to deliver it.

Recognition from the industry

Earlier this year, we were honored to be named "Best Insurtech Solution for Life Insurance" by FinTech Breakthrough. Awards aren't why we do this work, but it's gratifying to see the industry recognize our insurance technology solutions alongside dozens of other innovative companies pushing similar industries forward. 

Looking ahead to 2026

The pace of innovation in life insurance technology is accelerating, not slowing down. Carriers are realizing that digital transformation isn't a nice-to-have anymore; it's table stakes for competing in a market where consumer expectations keep rising and new entrants keep pushing the envelope.

Industry trends for the new year are already emerging, like increased emphasis on automated life insurance underwriting, and breaking down structural barriers to digital insurance transformation, and we’ll be right there on the forefront.

The challenges ahead are big, but we've proven we can tackle them. And we're doing it alongside carrier customers who share our vision for what life insurance can become.

Here's to 2025, and to building an even better 2026 together.