Bestow

What Is Bestow?

Bestow is a Dallas-based life insurance technology company with an unusual origin story: it launched in 2016 as one of the most promising direct-to-consumer insurtechs in the country, then made the deliberate decision to exit consumer insurance entirely and rebuild itself as a B2B software platform for carriers. Understanding both chapters of that story is useful context for anyone researching the life insurance industry and the companies shaping it.

Today, Bestow does not sell life insurance directly to consumers. If you are looking to buy a term life policy, Bestow is not the place to go. But the company remains highly relevant to the life insurance landscape — because the digital infrastructure powering many modern carriers runs on Bestow’s technology.

The Direct-to-Consumer Chapter (2016–2024)

Bestow was founded in Dallas in 2016 by Melbourne O’Banion and Jonathan Abelmann with a simple premise: buying term life insurance should take minutes, not weeks. At the time, the traditional process involved paper applications, medical exams, weeks of underwriting, and an agent as the mandatory middleman. Bestow set out to eliminate all of that.

The company built a fully digital application flow that used algorithmic underwriting to make instant coverage decisions — no medical exam required for most applicants. Policies were issued through North American Company for Life and Health, an Iowa-based carrier with an A+ rating from AM Best, which provided the financial backing behind Bestow’s modern front end.

The product was term life only, with coverage amounts ranging from $50,000 to $1.5 million and term lengths of 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 years. Premiums were fixed for the full term. The application took most people under 10 minutes to complete online. Bestow raised significant venture capital — over $200 million in total funding including a $120 million Series D — and was widely cited as a model for how technology could modernize an industry that had resisted change for decades.

By the early 2020s, however, the economics of direct-to-consumer life insurance proved difficult to sustain at scale. Customer acquisition costs were high, the addressable market of consumers willing to buy life insurance entirely online without human guidance proved narrower than anticipated, and the post-2021 venture environment made capital-intensive consumer insurance businesses harder to justify. Bestow was not alone in this — several well-funded insurtechs faced similar pressure during the same period.

The Pivot to B2B SaaS

Rather than continuing to compete for direct-to-consumer customers, Bestow made a strategic decision to license its technology to the carriers it had originally been competing against. The insight was straightforward: the real value Bestow had built was not its brand or customer base — it was the underwriting engine, the digital application infrastructure, and the policy administration technology underneath it.

In 2024, Bestow completed its exit from consumer insurance by selling its carrier subsidiary to Sammons Financial Group, one of the largest privately held companies in the United States. Sammons renamed the entity Lantern Insurance Company and continues operating it as a conventional carrier. With that transaction closed, Bestow became a pure software company.

What Bestow Does Today

Bestow’s current platform is built for insurance carriers that want to replace legacy systems with modern, API-driven technology. The company organizes its offering into three areas:

New Business — Bestow’s application suite handles digital submission and processing of new policy applications. This includes a consumer-facing application flow, an underwriting engine that carriers configure to their own risk rules, and an agent portal for distribution through licensed producers. Carriers can deploy the full suite or individual modules depending on what their existing systems already handle.

Policy Administration — After a policy is issued, Bestow’s administration platform takes over. This includes an admin portal for carrier staff, a policyholder-facing customer portal, and third-party administration (TPA) services for carriers that want to outsource ongoing policy servicing entirely. The platform handles premium payments, policy changes, beneficiary updates, and claims notifications.

Intelligence and Analytics — Bestow offers a Performance IQ dashboard for tracking application conversion and underwriting results, a data optimization suite, and an Innovation Lab where carriers can prototype new products and test underwriting approaches before launching them at scale.

The platform supports term life, final expense, and indexed universal life (IUL) products — a broader product range than Bestow offered when it was selling directly to consumers.

Who Uses Bestow’s Platform

Bestow’s customers are established insurance carriers looking to modernize. Their typical buyer is a mid-to-large carrier with a legacy administration system that creates friction in the application process, slows down underwriting decisions, or makes it difficult to launch new products quickly. Bestow positions itself as the technology layer that lets carriers compete with insurtechs without building the infrastructure themselves.

Because Bestow operates as invisible infrastructure, consumers generally do not know when a carrier they are buying from is running on Bestow’s platform. The carrier’s brand is front and center; Bestow is in the background.

Market Position and Funding

Bestow is one of a small number of insurtechs that navigated the post-2021 funding pullback by shifting its business model before running out of runway. The pivot from consumer-facing carrier to enterprise SaaS is rare in the insurtech space — most companies either doubled down on direct-to-consumer or failed outright. Bestow’s ability to monetize its technology through licensing rather than policy premiums gives it a more capital-efficient path to growth.

The company has raised over $200 million in venture funding from investors including Goldman Sachs, Valar Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and others. The Series D round alone — $120 million raised in 2021 — valued the company at over $1.3 billion at the time, making it one of the more highly valued insurtechs of that era.

For consumers researching where to buy life insurance, Bestow is not a direct option. But for anyone tracking how the life insurance industry is modernizing — and who is building the technology that will power the next generation of carriers — Bestow is a company worth understanding.

For our independently reviewed and ranked term life insurance recommendations, see our Best Term Life Insurance Companies page.