The push to modernize the life insurance industry is accelerating, and the latest sign comes from Modern Life, a fast-growing brokerage that has built its entire business around intelligent automation. The company has just secured a new $20 million Series A round led by Thrive Capital, with strategic support from New York Life Ventures, Northwestern Mutual, and Allegis.
This takes Modern Life’s total funding to $35 million, and it signals how much confidence major insurers are placing in the Modern Life AI platform as the sector searches for real efficiency.
The timing is no coincidence. The US life insurance market, worth roughly $175 billion, still depends heavily on advisors, who drive about 90% of all policies sold. Yet the sales process has barely changed in decades. It remains slow, manual, and full of friction.
Many permanent life insurance policies take half a year to close, mostly because advisors must juggle paperwork, underwriting requirements, and back-and-forth exchanges with carriers. That lag has long frustrated clients and limited how many people advisors can serve at once.
Modern Life is betting that a smarter workflow can unlock a different kind of experience. Instead of layering technology on top of legacy systems, the company built its platform around AI from day one.
The Modern Life AI platform weaves intelligence through every stage of the client journey, from generating quotes to organizing medical evidence to delivering policies. The goal is simple but ambitious: give advisors the kind of modern tools they have never had, without changing the core client relationship that still defines this market.
Life insurance is famously complex, and the industry’s slow pace of change has been driven by that complexity. Advisors must balance financial planning, tax optimization, medical underwriting, and carrier-specific rules that shift constantly. Every client carries different risks and long-term goals.
These variables make the product difficult to standardize and overwhelming to manage manually. Yet Modern Life sees that complexity as exactly the reason automation must step in.
Michael Konialian, Modern Life’s founder and CEO, has said many times that the sector expects advisors to deliver clarity and personalized recommendations, even while drowning in administrative work. He frames the problem as both human and structural. Advisors want to focus on their clients.
But the process around them is so fragmented that the industry struggles to move forward. That is the context in which his team built the Modern Life AI platform: a single environment where all the scattered pieces can finally come together.
The platform’s AI can analyze financial data and medical information in minutes, a process that traditionally stretches across several weeks. It narrows down competitive carriers based on a client’s risk profile and goals.
It also blends insurance, tax planning, and long-term financial considerations into one recommendation flow. Advisors can give clients answers faster, with more accuracy, and with less time spent chasing paperwork.
Workflow automation sits at the center of the experience. Instead of forcing advisors to jump between outdated portals and email threads, Modern Life pulls client data, quotes, applications, medical evidence, and carrier requirements into a single dashboard. Every step appears in the right order.
Everything an advisor needs sits in one view. Even small frictions, like retrieving medical exam status or checking which carrier fits a client’s health history, become almost instant. Because so much of the work is automated, advisors no longer lose time to repetitive tasks that once dictated the entire pace of sales.
Modern Life has also expanded access to more than 30 carriers spanning permanent life, term life, annuities, and long-term care. Quotes that once took days now appear within minutes. And because the Modern Life AI platform evaluates multiple underwriting paths at once, it can surface more cost-effective options that advisors might have missed.
The company says this shift can produce cost savings of up to 20% for clients, largely through better product selection and more precise risk analysis.
The involvement of major insurers in the Series A round is another sign that the industry is paying attention. Investors like Thrive Capital see a huge opportunity hiding in plain sight. Life insurance may be a large and stable market, but it has not evolved at the same pace as other financial products.
There is still enormous room for improvement, especially as younger consumers expect faster service and better digital experiences. Nabil Mallick, Partner at Thrive Capital, describes the market as one of the biggest untapped areas in financial services. He views the Modern Life AI platform as the type of infrastructure shift that can create lasting value across carriers, advisors, and clients.
Insurers with long histories, like New York Life, echo this sentiment. Their view is that advisors are still central to how people buy life insurance, and that will not change. What needs to evolve is the technology supporting those advisors. Tim Del Bello, Head of Investments at New York Life Ventures, has pointed out that Modern Life’s approach strengthens the advisor rather than trying to replace them.
AI becomes a tool that enhances human guidance instead of competing with it. That distinction matters because regulators and consumers continue to favor advice that blends expertise with personal connection.
Regulation is another area where Modern Life has invested heavily. The company is licensed in all 50 states and maintains SOC 2 certification, giving advisors confidence that the system can support high-stakes client data.
The platform also consolidates steps that often require multiple legacy tools, reducing the risk of errors and improving compliance across the board. This is critical for an industry that operates under some of the most detailed regulatory frameworks in US financial services.
As Modern Life moves into its next stage of growth, the company plans to expand its partnerships, strengthen its carrier network, and continue refining the AI at the core of the platform. The ambition is not simply to digitize an old industry but to rebuild the entire advisor workflow with intelligence at every layer.
The Modern Life AI platform aims to become the operating system of the life insurance advisory world, offering a faster, more organized, and more transparent experience for everyone involved.
The momentum behind the company suggests that the market is ready for that shift. Advisors want more control over their time. Clients want clearer answers and faster outcomes. Carriers want higher-quality submissions and more accurate underwriting.
When all three sides push in the same direction, technology can finally break open an industry that has resisted change for decades. Modern Life believes this is the moment when the entire ecosystem begins to move forward.
The Series A round only strengthens that position. With $20 million in new capital and a long list of heavyweight supporters, Modern Life now has the resources to scale quickly. And as more advisors adopt the Modern Life AI platform, the company hopes its system will become the default way life insurance gets delivered in the US. For an industry long accustomed to slow processes, that possibility is already changing expectations.
