Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of life insurance sales software, debuted on Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the first major tech IPOs of the year, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 IPO cycle.
The company and its selling shareholders raised about $200 million in the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the closer picks in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos operates a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without medical examinations. It says more than 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell these policies, and that carriers such as Legal & General America and John Hancock rely on it for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos itself is not an insurance company – it is a licensed agency that earns commission on sales.
Although the company’s stock closed its first day as a public company at $16.85, 11% below its IPO of $19, Ethos co-founders Peter Colis and Lingke Wang still have plenty to celebrate after growing the 10-year-old company to public market scale.
“When we launched [the business]there were like 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 turned around, been acquired at subscale, remain subscale, or have gone bankrupt.”
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, filed for bankruptcy that same year.
Ethos, which has raised over $400 million in venture capital, could easily have succumbed to a similar fate. Instead, the company remained laser-focused on reaching profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising ended in 2022. “Not knowing what the ongoing funding climate would be, we got really serious about securing profitability,” Colis said.
The financial discipline turned it into a profitable business by mid-2023, according to its listing documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained year-on-year revenue growth of more than 50%. In the nine months ended September 30, 2025, the company generated nearly $278 million in revenue and just under $46.6 million in net income.
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Still, the company ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of about $1.1 billion, a valuation significantly below 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 insurance companies are over a century old, being publicly traded signals the company’s staying power.
The largest external shareholders of Ethos include prominent firms including Sequoia, Accel, Google’s venture arm GV and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell shares in the IPO, the company said.