Prior to the pandemic, most life insurance searches began online but more than 90% of policies were secured through an in-person interaction with a broker. COVID has not only served as a boon for the industry as consumers paid more attention to their financial security but also a catalyst for digital transformation. Virtual capabilities for advisors and brokers, digital applications, the electronic delivery of policies, and underwriting automation are all key priorities where significant demand exists to keep up with today’s discerning consumer. Modern Life is a tech-enabled life insurance brokerage that brings these insurance digital capabilities to advisors to allow them to best serve their clients’ needs across the life insurance spectrum. Insurance advisors using the platform can offer both whole life and term policies as well as long-term care and disability options. In the background streamlining the purchase process is a sophisticated data-driven underwriting assessment engine, comparison quoting, document management solution, and administrative functions. The average life insurance policy takes three months to secure, Modern Life is on a mission to turn this into mere minutes. Policies are available to customers in all 50 states and Modern Life is currently working with 15+ policy providers including industry leaders such as AIG, Prudential, and John Hancock.
AlleyWatch caught up with Modern Life Cofounder and CEO Michael Konialian to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We announced that we raised $15M in seed funding, led by Thrive Capital. We also had 12 unicorn founders join the round from Hippo, Plaid, Reddit, Flatiron Health, Newfront, At Bay, Vouch, Cedar, and Lattice.
Tell us about the product or service that Modern Life offers.
We are a tech-enabled brokerage for life insurance and other underwritten financial products like disability and long-term care. We think that buying life insurance should take minutes, not months. And our approach to this is to empower life advisors, because we believe strongly that the advisor is a key part of the process. We’ve built out a platform that blends fully digital workflows, a suite of comprehensive insurance products, and a deep bench of brokerage experts to support advisors. We are digitizing and designing for the advisor at every stage of the process: from underwriting to application to practice management, and giving advisors tools that they can be proud to share with their clients.
Modern Life advisors have more time and freedom to do what they do best: engage with their clients, guide them through the whole process, and run their business more efficiently at the same time.
What inspired the start of Modern Life?
The original inspiration for Modern Life actually came from my own experience of buying life insurance for my family during the pandemic. I went through the process and was stunned by how challenging it was, even though I had pretty extensive experience in the industry.
I had to do an in-person medical exam, fill out 50 pages of application forms, and sit through an hour-long phone interview. It required countless signatures and touch points and the whole experience took months. The whole experience convinced me that we could dramatically transform the customer experience through technology.
How is Modern Life different?
Our mission is to help everyone protect what matters most. We build technology and brokerage solutions not only for simple client needs but also for the most complex. Most tech startups focus on only the most simple underwriting profiles and client needs.
We also have a fresh approach to technology. One of our core approaches is to be ‘customer-back’ vs ‘product-forward’ – we want to optimize for the client need vs pushing a single product or marketing channel. Most existing solutions in this space focus on a single problem, which means that advisors have had to deal with different platforms that don’t work well together. We’re building an end-to-end solution, where all of the parts work together seamlessly, designed by a team with both beautiful design and user experience in mind.
What market does Modern Life target and how big is it?
The size of the life insurance market is $150 billion in the U.S. Of that, we’re focused on the clients served by advisors, which comprise 90% majority of the market and is a space that tech startups traditionally haven’t focused on.
In addition to permanent and term life insurance, we also help advisors and their clients apply for other life planning products, like long-term care, disability insurance, and annuities.
What’s your business model?
We view our offering as threefold:
- First, we are building a leading technology platform to help advisors understand client needs, match them against the right offering, and move through the application and underwriting process quickly and efficiently.
- Second, we have built out a set of leading experts on the brokerage side, who can provide expert support to advisors, especially for more complex client needs.
- Finally, we’ve built out (and will continue to build) a leading shelf of insurance companies and a wide breadth of products to be able to meet every need.
How are you preparing for a potential recession?
We’re fortunate to be growing and we anticipate being in a strong economic position throughout the course of our growth. The key to sustaining that economic position is going to be supporting advisors and more complex cases in particular, which we are well-positioned to do.
What was the funding process like?
We were fortunate to find an incredibly close partner in Thrive Capital and have incubated the company with them. They have a lot of experience in this space from having worked with companies in analogous areas, such as Oscar Health. We’ve found that Thrive also shares our core belief of how important it is to empower the advisor.
We also have a investments from a cadre of 12 leading unicorn founders including from Hippo, Plaid, Reddit, Flatiron Health, Newfront, At Bay, Vouch, Cedar, and Lattice. They have a wealth of knowledge and have been really supportive as we tried to transform a huge market.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Not everyone has experienced the life insurance purchasing journey so we had to educate some of our prospective investors about what that looks like and why the process is often so broken today. With that said, it’s been incredibly rewarding to find investors and others who have been through it and appreciated having an advisor as a guide, or thought a lot could be done to modernize the process.
We’re taking a swing at a big market that has struggled to adopt new technology, and we’re taking a novel and comprehensive approach to building a broad suite of tools and services for the advisor. We optimized for investors who share in those core beliefs and our approach to the market.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We’ve built a great team of fintech and brokerage veterans who are uniquely equipped to take a major impact at a huge opportunity.
We’ve also been able to show great traction with an early cohort of advisors. We worked closely with advisors for a year in stealth, receiving their real-world feedback, designing, and implementing solutions to their needs, which means that our product is not only beautifully designed, but is developed with the advisor’s and their clients’ needs in mind.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Now that we have this funding, we’re going to be in heads-down mode. It’s all about focus and growing the team, both our technical product development organization and our brokerage team that recruits and serves advisors. This fundraise just gives us a lot more firepower to widen our reach.
We have an incredibly deep respect for the industry as it is. Half of our team is very experienced in the brokerage and life insurance world. But we also have decades of combined experience in terms of building high-tech businesses that are focused on product design and user experience. And so the next six-to-12 months will be all about bringing that together and continuing to build on the foundation that we’ve laid over the past year.
We have an incredibly deep respect for the industry as it is. Half of our team is very experienced in the brokerage and life insurance world. But we also have decades of combined experience in terms of building high-tech businesses that are focused on product design and user experience. And so the next six-to-12 months will be all about bringing that together and continuing to build on the foundation that we’ve laid over the past year.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
I would tell them to focus on the core team. We would not be where we are today without a small group of very dedicated individuals, each uniquely suited to their role but capable of wearing many hats at the same time.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
On average, in our industry, it takes over three months for an individual to get a policy once they begin the process. We believe that we can cut that timeline from months to minutes.
We’ve already done a good job at streamlining the process, but there’s still a lot left for us to do.
We’re excited to continue developing technology and processes to help simplify and accelerate the insurance application process. We think that there are a lot of places where we can make it much easier for advisors to help their clients get quicker, more accurate quotes with less friction than before. We’re continuing to invest in building out new features in the platform that connect the different stakeholders from the client to advisor to underwriter.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
I’m a big fan of a neighborhood staple, Jack’s Wife Freda. It’s a restaurant that’s great at bringing people together, and it’s always bustling, regardless of the time that you visit. As good for friends as it is for colleagues and clients.
