About BerniePortal

Two years later, it was April 2008. The world was not on fire. Ha! Far from it. Turns out cold-calling employers about health insurance is a lot harder than they thought it would be.

After those two long years of cold-calling, Alex and Brian were still in their three-bedroom apartment, still with a “World Headquarters” sign hanging in the third bedroom. Only the sign didn’t seem as charming to them as when they first hung it.

One Nashville agency suggested that Alex hire it to draw pictures of what the software would look like, with annotations describing how it should work. No actual building of any software—just drawings. Alex and Brian would pay for those drawings, and then they could bid the project out to whoever they wanted. The drawings would cost $2,500. 

The brothers paid the $2,500 and got some great drawings. The bids based on those drawings came rolling in from the Nashville agencies, and the best one was $58,000! And even that bid came with a $300 cost just to talk about it.

The 11.5-hour time difference between Nashville and India suited him perfectly—he worked as a health insurance broker in Nashville from 8 a.m.–5 p.m. and worked with the team in India late at night or in the early morning hours.

The health insurance brokerage, Bernard Benefits, grew dramatically during those years, partly on the strength of offering BerniePortal as part of the brokerage’s services package. That was how Alex and Brian were able to justify continuing to invest in the software. This was the “incubation period” for BerniePortal, as only employers who were employer clients of Bernard Benefits were able to use it. This allowed the team to focus on getting things just right before rolling it out to a wider audience.

In preparation for that, in 2014 Alex hired BerniePortal’s first developer in Nashville. He also traveled to India for the first time to meet and work with the team there in person.

BerniePortal continued to experience rapid growth in 2017, and in 2018 its revenues even grew to be larger than the revenues of Bernard Benefits, which continues to be a thriving firm in its own right.

So we spent nearly four years building our own PTO, Time, Payroll features and more. We even built Recruiting, Compliance, and COBRA natively in the system. BerniePortal was no longer just a benefits platform — it became a place where HR could manage the entire employee lifecycle in one place.

One challenge to offering ICHRA is the administrative complexity. ICHRAs require Section 125 documents, ICHRA notices, substantiation, COBRA, 1095-B/C reporting, reimbursement processing. Plus, what about the group non-medical benefits? For the HR person who already wears ten hats, that can be a non-starter.

In 2026, BerniePortal partnered with eHealth, the leading individual health insurance marketplace, to address the complexity. Employees shop for and select their individual medical plan in the same enrollment flow as their group non-medical benefits in BerniePortal. BerniePortal handles COBRA, 1095s, reimbursement, and compliance – all in one place.

Eighteen years in. The best is still to come.