Collapsing six months into minutes
An advisor sits down to place a life insurance policy and opens eleven browser tabs. Quoting tools that do not talk to underwriting tools that do not talk to case management. Forms that get faxed. Decisions that take a season. Michael Konialian looked at that workflow and saw a stopwatch running in the wrong units. Modern Life, the company he founded and runs as CEO, exists to change the unit from months to minutes.
The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: one dashboard, instant quotes from more than 30 carriers, AI-driven underwriting, and decisions that often arrive without a medical exam.
Modern Life is a tech-enabled life insurance brokerage built for the people who actually sell life insurance - financial advisors. It is licensed in all 50 states. Advisors pay nothing; the carriers pay Modern Life when a policy is placed. In a $175 billion U.S. market where roughly 90% of policies move through about 500,000 advisors, that distinction matters. Konialian is not trying to delete the advisor. He is trying to give the advisor a faster horse, then a car.
Our North Star is empowering life insurance advisors - to make buying insurance go from something that takes months to something that takes minutes.
It started with his own family
The founding story is not a whiteboard. It is a desk, a stack of paperwork, and a man trying to protect his kids. Konialian set out to buy life insurance for his family and came away floored - his word - by how confusing, invasive, and outdated the process was. The exam. The waiting. The opacity. He had spent a career watching technology rewire industries, and here was one that had somehow dodged the upgrade.
So he did the founder thing and refused to accept the status quo. He partnered with fintech veteran Jack Arenas, and Modern Life was born from a customer complaint he could not stop thinking about. The frustration was specific enough to be a product spec.
"I saw a sector that was ripe for disruption, with outdated processes and a lack of customer-centric solutions," he has said. Behind it sits a conviction he states plainly: a deep-seated belief in the power of technology to revolutionize industries and improve lives and livelihoods.
Space structures, nuclear physicists, then insurance
Most insurtech founders come from insurance. Konialian came from orbit. He began as an aerospace engineer working on space structures, with experience tied to NASA. Then he served with the U.S. Department of State in an office that, by his telling, mixed nuclear physicists with lawyers - which is either the setup to a joke or excellent training for translating between people who do not speak the same language.
From there: McKinsey & Company, advising major financial services companies on growth strategy and digital transformation. Then CoverWallet, where he built and led the advisor business through hypergrowth until Aon acquired it, after which he incubated technology-enabled businesses inside Aon. Princeton engineering, cum laude. Harvard MBA. The thread running through all of it is not a single industry. It is the seam between technical and human, which happens to be exactly where life insurance gets stuck.
I'm always the least technical person in a technical audience and the most technical person in a non-technical one.
Sold, not bought
Plenty of startups tried to take the human out of insurance and sell policies straight to consumers. Konialian read the market differently. Life insurance, he argues, is sold, not bought - it needs expert guidance, which is why advisors still move the overwhelming majority of policies. The contrarian move was to bet on the advisor instead of against them.
That bet shapes the whole product. Modern Life consolidates more than ten disconnected legacy tools into a single workflow: quoting, underwriting, and case management in one place, spanning permanent life, term, annuities, and long-term care. The company says smart product selection alone can save clients up to 20%. Express decisions can land in minutes, often with no medical exam. The advisor stays the hero of the story. The software just stops getting in their way.
The capital agrees. Thrive Capital led the $15M seed, then came back to lead the $20M Series A announced in November 2025, joined by New York Life Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, and Allegis - strategic names that read like a who's-who of the industry Modern Life is rewiring. Total raised: $35M.
A cyclist in a city that fights cyclists
Konialian lives in New York with young children. He is a cyclist who freely admits the city is hostile terrain for it, and he joins company group workouts when the calendar allows. He likes live music enough to have turned up at a Taylor Swift concert. When he eats, it is often at Balthazar or Lure Fishbar in SoHo. For founders, he points to two books on repeat: Eric Ries's The Lean Startup and Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street - the second one used hard, because a company is only as good as the people you talk into joining it.