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Meagan Ward Learned Storytelling in a Robot Club. Now She’s Selling the Future of Life Insurance.
An art-history graduate found her vocation among robots, learned to translate complex software into human stakes, and spent seven years growing with Addepar. At Bestow, her new assignment is to make life-insurance infrastructure feel less like plumbing and more like possibility.
Melbourne O'Banion
Melbourne O'Banion is the co-founder and CEO of Bestow, a Dallas-based digital life insurance platform that shrunk a four-to-six-week underwriting process into a five-minute checkout. After stints founding Presidio Title and co-founding luxury skincare brand Beauty Bioscience with his wife, he teamed up with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 to build the first fully digital life insurance carrier, later pivoting into SaaS infrastructure for incumbent carriers. Bestow closed a $120M Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Smith Point Capital in May 2025.