Bestow's brand mark. The Dallas company traded its consumer insurance business for a place inside the industry's back office.
The company that quietly became the software running life insurance for Nationwide, Transamerica and USAA.
"There is a growing need for a modern insurance technology platform." - Goldman Sachs Alternatives
Most technology startups that entered life insurance over the past decade tried to win by selling policies faster than the incumbents. Bestow, founded in Dallas in 2016 by Melbourne O'Banion and Jonathan Abelmann, started that way too - a mobile-first brand where a customer could buy term coverage in about five minutes, with no nurse visit, no blood draw and no weeks of waiting. Then, in 2024, it did something unusual. It sold that consumer business to Sammons Financial Group and pointed its entire company at a less visible prize: becoming the software the carriers themselves run on.
The pivot reframed what Bestow is. Today it is a business-to-business technology company that gives life and annuity insurers a vertically integrated platform - digital quoting and applications, automated underwriting, policy administration and self-service portals - delivered as modular, API-based software. Instead of competing with carriers for customers, it sells them the rails those customers move across. The strategy has a tidy logic: insurance companies know their technology is decades behind, but rebuilding it internally can take years. Bestow offers the shortcut.
That shortcut has attracted names that anchor the industry. The platform now supports Nationwide, Transamerica, USAA and Sammons Financial Group - the same firm that bought Bestow's carrier. In May 2025 the company closed a $120 million oversubscribed Series D, co-led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Smith Point Capital, alongside a $50 million credit facility from TriplePoint Capital. It has now raised more than $377 million since inception.
The choice to sell the consumer arm was not a retreat so much as a narrowing. Running a carrier meant carrying insurance risk, holding reserves and answering to regulators as an underwriter - a very different business from writing software. By handing the policies to Sammons, Bestow kept the part it was best at and shed the part that competed for its attention. The bet is that the durable value in insurance technology sits with the firms that issue millions of policies, not with any single direct-to-consumer brand, and that those firms would rather buy a modern stack than spend half a decade building one.
The investment strengthens Bestow's position as the preferred partner for life insurance and annuity providers seeking to modernize and scale.Melbourne O'Banion - CEO & Co-Founder
Bestow's users are life and annuity insurance carriers and their distribution partners. These are large, cautious, heavily regulated organizations, many of them more than a century old, running policy systems that predate the internet. The problem Bestow solves is not a lack of demand for insurance - it is the gap between what customers now expect and what legacy carriers can deliver.
An applicant expects to get a quote, apply and receive coverage on a phone in one sitting. A traditional carrier's process can involve paper applications, manual underwriting, medical exams and weeks of back-and-forth. Bestow closes that gap by handling the digital journey end to end, or by slotting into whatever single piece a carrier is missing. The company reports that this stickiness shows up in the numbers: 100% enterprise customer retention and a 245% year-over-year jump in transaction volume, with revenue tripling in 2024.
A configurable rules-and-decision engine that lets carriers launch digital, automated underwriting while keeping control over their own customizations.
Payment, billing, policy delivery and admin tools with customer and staff portals - plus full third-party administration (TPA) services.
Quote, illustration and application journeys for customers and agents that can issue coverage in minutes rather than weeks.
API infrastructure that lets partners embed 100% digital life insurance and connect carrier systems to external data.
Data science and AI tooling for risk assessment, predictive analytics and decision support across the policy lifecycle.
Supports term life, final expense, indexed universal life and more - deployed end to end or as modular components.
Plenty of insurtechs compete for the consumer's attention - Ladder, Ethos and Haven Life among them. Bestow deliberately stepped out of that race. Its closest comparisons now sit on the platform side: Socotra, EIS, Sureify, iPipeline, Majesco and Sapiens, firms that also sell software to carriers.
What sets Bestow apart
Its distinguishing move is vertical integration. Rather than offering one slice - only underwriting, or only administration - Bestow stitches the pieces into a single platform that a carrier can adopt end to end. That coherence is easier to buy than a patchwork of point solutions, and harder to rip out once it is running, which helps explain the reported full retention. Having operated its own carrier also gave Bestow something many software vendors lack: firsthand knowledge of how a policy actually gets sold, underwritten and serviced.
In the wider market, Bestow occupies the modernization layer of a very large, slow-moving industry. It does not carry insurance risk anymore; it sells the technology that lets others carry it better and faster. In an industry where launching a new product can take years, the company's core pitch is time - compressing that timeline to months.
Expertise
Bestow's depth sits at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely share a building: insurance operations and modern software engineering. Its keyword footprint spans digital underwriting, policy lifecycle automation, predictive analytics, data modeling and regulatory compliance tooling - the unglamorous machinery of how a life policy is priced, issued and serviced. The company pairs that domain knowledge with a contemporary engineering stack and a data-science practice, applying rules engines and AI-assisted decisioning to problems that many carriers still handle by hand.
Because Bestow once operated as a carrier itself, its expertise is not purely theoretical. It has felt the friction of underwriting a real applicant, delivering a real policy and administering it over time. That operator's memory informs how the platform is designed - for the messy realities of compliance, distribution and customer service rather than a whiteboard ideal.
CEO & Co-Founder
Also co-founded the skincare brand BeautyBio and was a founding member of Texas title agency Presidio Title. Studied finance and ancient Near Eastern studies at BYU. Based in Dallas.
President & Co-Founder
Previously co-founded Invitation Homes before starting Bestow. Focuses on real estate, finance and insurance with a technology bent.
Bestow is transforming how insurers create and deliver products.Keith Block - Smith Point Capital
Melbourne O'Banion and Jonathan Abelmann set out to modernize life insurance.
An early round funds a digital-first life insurance product.
Customers buy coverage in minutes with no medical exam; partners embed insurance via API.
Bestow deepens its underwriting and platform technology.
Goldman Sachs Growth and others back the platform's expansion.
Bestow divests its consumer carrier to Sammons Financial Group; revenue triples.
An oversubscribed round co-led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Smith Point Capital; total funding tops $377M.
Bestow no longer earns money by selling insurance policies. Its model is enterprise SaaS and technology services: carriers license the platform - as a full end-to-end system or as individual modules - and pay for administration services, with usage tied to transaction volume. Bestow also provides third-party administration, running back-office operations on a carrier's behalf. Reported annual revenue is in the neighborhood of $100 million, growing off a base that roughly tripled in 2024.
Bestow provides technology to life and annuity insurance carriers - a platform for digital applications, automated underwriting, policy administration and self-service portals - so insurers can modernize and scale their operations.
No. Bestow sold its consumer carrier, Bestow Life Insurance Company, to Sammons Financial Group in 2024 and now operates exclusively as a B2B software and services provider.
Life and annuity carriers and distributors, including named enterprise customers such as Nationwide, Transamerica, USAA and Sammons Financial Group.
Over $377 million in total, including a $120 million Series D in May 2025 co-led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Smith Point Capital.
Bestow is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and was founded in 2016 by Melbourne O'Banion (CEO) and Jonathan Abelmann (President).