Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, made its Nasdaq debut on Thursday. As one of the first major tech IPOs of the year, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as the bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle.
The company and its selling shareholders raised about $200 million from the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the symbol “LIFE” — one of the most persistent options in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos operates a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without a medical exam. It says more than 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell these policies, and agencies like Legal & General America and John Hancock rely on it for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos itself is not an insurer — it is a licensed company that earns commissions on sales.
Although the company’s stock closed its first day public at $16.85, down 11% from its IPO price of $19, Ethos co-founders Peter Colis and Lingke Wang still have plenty to celebrate, having grown the 10-year-old business to public market scale.
“When we started [the business]There were about eight or nine other life insurtech startups that were very similar to Ethos, with similar Series A funding,” Colis told TechCrunch. “Over time, the vast majority of these startups have spun off, been acquired at subscale, remain subscale, or gone out of business.”
For example, Policygenius, which raised over $250 million from investors including KKR and Norwest Venture Partners, was acquired by PE-backed Zinnia in 2023. Meanwhile, Health IQ, a startup that secured more than $200 million from prominent VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, declared bankruptcy the same year.
Ethos, which has raised more than $400 million in venture capital, could easily succumb to a similar fate. Instead, the company remained laser-focused on achieving profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising came to an end in 2022. “Not knowing what the ongoing funding climate would be, we took securing profitability very seriously,” Colis said.
This financial discipline has turned it into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to the same IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-over-year revenue growth rate of over 50%. In the nine months ending September 30, 2025, the company generated revenue of nearly $278 million and net income of just under $46.6 million.
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However, the company ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of about $1.1 billion, a valuation significantly lower than the $2.7 billion it raised in its last private round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021.
When asked why Ethos went public, Colis said a big part of the reason was to bring “additional trust and credibility” to potential partners and customers. He explained that because many large insurers are more than a century old, being publicly traded signals the company’s staying power.
Ethos’ largest outside shareholders include prominent firms such as Sequoia, Accel, Google’s venture arm GV and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell shares of the IPO, the company show up.
