tengo

The permanent and variable life insurance great fortunes have always trusted. Tengo rewrites everything around it: how it's built, how it's held, and how it feels to hold.

Tengo. I have.

It begins with an instrument great fortunes have always trusted, high cash value life insurance, indexed and variable, optimized to do far more than insure a life. For generations, the work of fitting policy to client has been done by hand, expensively, over months. Tengo has been building a platform that does that work in software, exactly, and at a speed the field has never approached. Our people, who are the company, bring the care and attention the ultra-wealthy have come to expect, and the warmth of a relationship that holds across decades. The instrument, our platform, and our people are one experience, and our name says what it feels like to be inside that experience. The state of having, and the ease of having, too.

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How it works

Trusted instrument.

High cash value life insurance, indexed and variable. Great fortunes have trusted it for generations, and optimized with care it does far more than insure a life. It is the one thing here that was here before us, and the reason everything else was worth building.

New engine.

For generations, fitting policy to client has been done by hand, expensively, over months. Tengo has been building a platform that does that work in software, exactly, and at a speed the field has never approached, alongside people who have done this work for decades.

The care it always deserved.

Our people are the company. They bring the care and attention the ultra-wealthy have come to expect, with real warmth, and they stay. Every Tengo voice stands as host to guest.

Our team

John O'Grady

John O'Grady

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

John has spent his career building experiences people remember. In eleven years at Apple, he opened the Santa Monica flagship, launched Apple Retail in Europe with the Regent Street store in London, and led the company's Chicago and Manhattan flagship markets, along with key initiatives including Apple Retail's B2B strategy. Before Apple, he led store districts for Williams-Sonoma Inc., including Pottery Barn. Since Apple, he has built and advised ventures in insurtech, mobility, and consumer technology. Through all of it, he has held to one belief: exceptional customer experience reflects the culture behind it. At Tengo, he pairs that with a second conviction: financial security should let people live well now, not just in retirement.

Robin B. Shahani

Robin B. Shahani

Co-Founder, Chief Commercial Officer & Chief Operating Officer

Robin Shahani is responsible for developing Tengo's key partnerships and enterprise clients that fuel growth, as well as for the company's operations.

Robin has spent more than thirty years in fintech and financial services. Most recently at FIS, he drove strategic growth and efficiency efforts, including the company's AI-enabled reimagination of client experience and go-to-market after serving as Chief Procurement and Real Estate Officer, with oversight of $4 billion and 232 offices. He previously held global operating and transformation executive roles at TD Ameritrade, American Express, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank, as well as management consulting leadership positions at IBM's Promontory Financial Group, KPMG's EquaTerra, Silver Oak Partners, and Mitchell Madison Group.

Based in New York, Robin earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard and an executive leadership certificate from Cornell's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Business. He was inducted into the IAOP Hall of Fame in 2025 and has served on multiple nonprofit boards.

Rich Yaker

Rich Yaker

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

Rich has been building platforms on the web since March 1995, when RockWeb Interactive launched as one of the first music sites on the internet. He joined Netscape later that year as employee #937, where he learned JavaScript from Brendan Eich when almost no one else on the planet knew it yet. He was Founding CTO of WithoutABox, whose platform still ran the company when Amazon acquired it in 2008, and later led Global DevOps and SRE at Herbalife, scaling the team from four engineers to more than forty across six countries. Since 2023 he has worked full-time in AI, shipping open-source agent frameworks and developer tooling.

Pull up another chair.

If this is a conversation you've been meaning to have, we would like to have it with you. Write to us, and one of us will answer.

Write to us

Or write directly: info@tengolife.com

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