Modern Life raises $20M led by Thrive Capital to bring AI-driven underwriting to the $175B life insurance market

Life insurance isn’t known for speed. Advisors and clients continue to face cycle times, dense paperwork, and underwriting rules that vary endlessly from carrier to carrier. It’s one of the few financial products where closing a policy can still stretch across half a year. That’s the gap insurance tech startup Modern Life has spent the past two years trying to close, and its progress just drew another major vote of confidence from investors.

Today, Modern Life announced a new $20 million Series A round led by Thrive Capital, with support from New York Life Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, and Allegis. These are some of the largest insurers in the country, now throwing their weight behind a startup building tools that streamline the very industry they dominate. The raise brings Modern Life’s total funding to $35 million.

“We started Modern Life to solve a clear problem: we believe that advisors have an incredibly important job but face a complex and dizzying set of obstacles to serving their clients well,” said Michael Konialian, Founder and CEO of Modern Life. 

The company positions itself as a modern brokerage built around an AI system that helps advisors manage everything from underwriting to product selection. Life insurance sits at the intersection of medical assessment, tax strategy, financial planning, and carrier-specific rules. The pressure on advisors is immense: they have to compare dozens of carriers, optimize long-term financial outcomes, and guide clients through complex medical requirements. With typical permanent life policies taking months to close, the industry has long been primed for a redesign.

AI Meets Life Insurance: InsurTech Startup Modern Life Raises $20M to Tackle a $175B Market’s Complexity

Modern Life says its platform was built for this exact friction. Since its $15 million seed round—also led by Thrive—the company has rolled out instant quoting, data-driven underwriting, end-to-end agency management tools, and its Express Decision system, which can return underwriting offers four times faster than traditional timelines. Some clients can receive decisions in minutes.

Thrive Capital partner Nabil Mallick framed the opportunity plainly: “Life insurance remains one of the biggest untapped opportunities in financial services. Modern Life is reimagining how the industry works by empowering advisors with cutting-edge, AI-powered tools, unlocking lasting value for the entire ecosystem.”

The U.S. life insurance market is huge—about $175 billion—and roughly 90% of policies are distributed through advisors. Those advisors often operate with a stack of outdated tools, manual workflows, and fragmented data. Modern Life’s platform pulls all of that into a single system that handles quotes, applications, medical evidence, and client information. By embedding AI across each stage, the platform acts as a second brain for advisors, analyzing medical and financial data, surfacing the most competitive carriers, and supporting advisors as they weigh insurance, tax, and financial planning decisions.

Founder and CEO Michael Konialian said the problem the company is solving became clear early on: “We believe that advisors have an incredibly important job, but face a complex and dizzying set of obstacles to serve their clients well. We have been pushing the frontier of what is possible in life insurance, integrating what would have otherwise been served by over 10 fragmented legacy tools into a singular platform. Our AI helps advisors navigate the most complex parts of the job – it’s like having a medical underwriter, tax expert, financial planner, product specialist, and marketer at your side.”

New York Life Ventures shares that belief. Tim Del Bello, Head of Investments, said Modern Life’s advantage comes from supporting the role of advisors rather than trying to replace them. “Our experience at New York Life Ventures points to a simple truth: advisors are essential to how life insurance is purchased. Modern Life has built its growth on this foundation, using AI to elevate what advisors do best – serving their clients.”

Modern Life now gives advisors access to more than 30 carriers and every major product type, from term and permanent life to annuities and long-term care. Its quoting engine can reduce hours of manual work to minutes. The company says its approach can save clients up to 20% through smarter product selection, underwriting expertise, and more precise case placement across carriers.

Security is another area where Modern Life is trying to meet the industry’s expectations. The platform is SOC 2 certified and built with enterprise-grade data protections to ensure advisors and their firms can handle sensitive information with confidence.

Licensed in all 50 states, the company plans to use the new capital to scale its product, deepen its carrier partnerships, and continue building an AI system that can make life insurance feel less like a six-month paperwork slog and more like the modern financial service consumers expect.