What

Modern Life is a digital-first comprehensive offering to empower advisors building their practices for life insurance and other highly underwritten products such as long-term care and disability insurance. Advisors can leverage an integrated technology platform, seasoned brokerage expertise, as well as a panel of leading carriers. Founded in 2021, Modern Life has raised $15 million in Pre-Seed and Seed funding led by Thrive Capital.

Why

To Michael Konialian, Modern Life’s Co-Founder and CEO, the company’s mission doubles down on the need to empower the advisors who distribute life insurance every year, not cut them out. “The business model is very established right now,” he said. “But I will say the technology landscape is quite challenging, and each carrier has a different system and a way of doing business; the actual technology tools that advisors have are quite legacy, disconnected, and broken.” 

“Right now kind of works for brokerages, but it's like trudging through mud,” Jack Arenas, Co-Founder and CTO, chimed in, mentioning disjointed systems depending on Microsoft Word and checks in the mail. “There are a lot of opportunities across the full stack.”

How

Modern Life is currently building the first version of its universal app, which will enable advisors to use a single app for virtually every carrier. In the existing system advisors face, they have to consult carriers’ websites or platforms individually. Modern Life’s current product roadmap follows the life cycle of the insurance sales: It covered the advice-centered user journey of advisors last year, and now is tackling the application portion. Thereafter, it will dive into management, through which advisors will be able to manage policies and get carrier feeds over time. 

Central to Modern Life’s product roadmap are the hiring decisions it made while building out its team. By hiring veterans from the insurance industry, it was able to bypass time-consuming exploratory phases and avoid learning “issues the hard way,” Arenas said. The Modern Life team can succeed because of “the integration between the brokerage team tech and product team, and a deep respect for why the industry is the way it is.” 

Through ongoing user research with brokers and advisors, Modern Life can add more products for sale on its platforms based on demand. It added long-term care and disability insurance due to their feedback, which makes the Modern Life platform more useful for the startup’s client base. “We've been really just responsive to their demand, and we continue to have that be the core driving force in what we do,” Konialian said.