Rashmi 'Rush' Melgiri is the co-founder and CEO of Functional Finance, a San Francisco insurtech building the financial operations platform that automates billing, premium collection, reconciliation, and money movement for insurance operators. An MIT-trained economist, she previously co-founded and ran operations at CoverWallet, the commercial insurance startup acquired by Aon in 2020. She started Functional Finance in 2021 after living the pain of chasing money across email chains inside the insurance back office, and has since raised $36M, including a $20M Series A led by Walkabout Ventures, while growing premium payment volume more than 2,500% year over year.
Michael Konialian is the founder and CEO of Modern Life, an AI-powered life insurance brokerage built for financial advisors. After a winding path from aerospace structures at NASA to nuclear diplomacy at the U.S. State Department to scaling CoverWallet's advisor business into an Aon acquisition, he was floored by how confusing, invasive, and outdated it was to buy life insurance for his own family. Modern Life is his answer: a single dashboard that lets advisors pull instant quotes from 30-plus carriers and compress a process that once took six months into minutes. In November 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Thrive Capital, bringing total funding to $35M.