It’s been a busy year for Bestow, an insurtech startup that uses AI to help applicants apply for a life insurance policy. The startup is expanding into new channels and has doubled its year-to-date revenue.
“We’ve made some big bets around the turn of the year coming into 2021. And I think in many cases if you make a handful of bets, you’re lucky if half of them kind of hit, but we were really fortunate where basically all of them have hit,” Jonathan Abelmann, Bestow president and co-founder, told Built In. “So that’s really just required deeper levels of investment and resourcing to really scale and meet the opportunities and the demand for each of our business lines.”
These bets and business lines Abelmann refers to include expanding beyond Bestow’s direct-to-consumer product into software licensing partnerships with traditional insurers and financial advisor sales. The company also branched into embedded insurance, which allows Bestow to offer life insurance as a service to other fintech or insurance platforms. Abelmann also said Bestow is working to launch an enterprise product.
To keep up with demand, Bestow hired about 80 people over the last three months and currently has 180 employees split between Austin, Dallas and remote. About 20 of the recent new hires will join the company by the end of the month, bringing Bestow’s total headcount to 200.
But the growth isn’t stopping there. Bestow plans to add an additional 70+ new hires later this year, and is actively hiring for dozens of open positions. This would nearly triple the size of Bestow’s team year over year — growing from 100 employees at the beginning of 2021 to at least 270 by year’s end.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” Abelmann said.
Bestow also signed a four-year sublease on a 20,000-square-foot office along Congress Avenue to accommodate its growing team. Employees will move into the new space, previously leased by Dropbox, by the end of Q1 of next year, Abelmann said.
Bestow was founded in 2016 by Abelmann and Melbourne O’Banion, who serves as the company’s CEO. Since launching, Bestow has raised $150 million and is in the process of acquiring Centurion Life Insurance Company from Wells Fargo — something Bestow announced last December.
