Bobby Samuelson spent his career building life and annuity products, leading product development and pricing at MetLife and Brighthouse Financial before founding Life Innovators, where his team designs products for carriers across the industry. From that seat he watched the same thing happen on every launch. Actuaries would build and sign off a model. A vendor would rebuild its logic in production code. Then both sides would spend months reconciling the two before anyone could sell the product, and every rate, product or assumption change sent them back around the loop. Carriers were paying exorbitant amounts and waiting far too long for what should have been the easy part.
The fix was hiding in plain sight. Every carrier already has powerful, trusted models in Excel, so instead of translating them, Illustrata runs them. The actuaries’ own calculation tool becomes the production engine, hosted on Coherent Spark as an API, and there is nothing to rebuild and nothing to reconcile: actuarial, IT, compliance and distribution all run the same math. In 2024 Bobby, Marshall Tilley and Caleb Shumpert founded Illustrata to bring that approach to life and annuity carriers, with faster implementations, one flat annual fee and illustrations that return in seconds.
- BeforeAt Life Innovators, Bobby, Marshall and Caleb see carriers rebuild, reconcile and retest illustrations on every product launch.
- 2024Illustrata co-founded by Bobby Samuelson, Marshall Tilley and Caleb Shumpert, and the first carrier goes live the same year with the actuaries’ Excel model as the production engine.
- 2025Ian Martens joins to lead client relations and integrations as more carriers come on board.
- 2026Nick Taylor and Daisy Rhoad join; the team grows across design, illustration and operations.
- TodayFIA, MYGA and SPIA/DIA illustrations delivered as APIs, embedded on carrier websites, agent portals and e-apps, all returning the same numbers and PDF.
