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.