Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of life insurance sales software, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the first major tech IPOs of the year, the insurance platform is closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing 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 most interesting picks in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos runs a three-sided platform where consumers buy insurance 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 insurers like Legal & General America and John Hancock use it for their underwriting and administration services. Ethos itself is not an insurer, 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 price of $19, Ethos co-founders Peter Colis and Lingke Wang still have plenty to celebrate, having grown the 10-year-old company to a public market scale.
“When we launched [the business]”, Colis told TechCrunch. “Over time, the vast majority of these startups have pivoted, been acquired at a subscale, remain at a subscale, or gone out of business.”
For example, Policygenius, which has raised more than 250 million dollars of investors, including KKR and Norwest Venture Partners, was acquired by Zinnia, supported by PE in 2023. Meanwhile, Health IQ, a startup that has secured more than $200 million from top venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy that same year.
Ethos, which raised more than $400 million in venture capital, could easily have succumbed to the same fate. Instead, the company remained focused on achieving profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising ended in 2022. “Not knowing what the current financing climate would be, we took ensuring profitability very seriously,” Colis said.
This financial discipline has transformed it into a profitable business by mid-2023, according to its IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a revenue growth rate of over 50% year-over-year. In the nine months ending 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 lower than the company’s. $2.7 billion it raised in its last private funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021.
When asked why Ethos went public, Colis said a large part of the reason was to provide “additional trust and credibility” to potential partners and customers. He explained that since many large insurance companies are more than a century old, being publicly traded is a testament to the longevity of the business.
Ethos’ major outside shareholders include prominent companies including Sequoia, Accel, GV, the venture capital arm of Google, and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell shares in the IPO, the company disclosed.
