Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based company that provides software for selling life insurance, made its debut on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the first major technology IPOs this year, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a leader for the 2026 listing cycle.
The company and its selling shareholders raised nearly $200 million from the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 per share under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the shrewdest options in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos operates a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without medical checks. It says more than 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell those 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 commissions 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 Collis and Lingqi Wang still have a lot to celebrate, having grown the 10-year-old business to public market scale.
“When we launched [the business]“There were about eight or nine other life insurance tech startups that looked very similar to Ethos, with similar Series A funding,” Collis told TechCrunch. “Over time, the vast majority of those startups pivoted, were acquired to subscale, stayed in subscale or went out of business.”
For example, Policygenius, which has raised more than $250 million from investors including KKR and Norwest Venture Partners, Acquired by PE-backed Zinnia in 2023. Meanwhile, Health IQ, a startup that has secured more than $200 million from prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Filed for bankruptcy In the same year.
Ethos, which has raised more than $400 million in venture capital, could easily have succumbed to a similar fate. Instead, the company has remained laser-focused on achieving profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising ends in 2022. “We don’t know what the ongoing funding climate will be like,” Collis said. “We are getting really serious about ensuring profitability.”
This financial discipline turned it into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to her Subscription documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-over-year revenue growth rate of more than 50%. In the nine months ended September 30, 2025, the company generated approximately $278 million in revenue and just under $46.6 million in net income.
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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 well below the $2.7 billion it received in its last private round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021.
When asked why Ethos went public, Collis said a big part of the reason was to bring “extra trust and credibility” to potential partners and customers. He explained that since many major insurance companies are more than a century old, being publicly traded indicates the company remains in power.
Ethos’ largest external shareholders include notable companies, including Sequoia, Accel, GV and SoftBank, Google’s investment arm, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell any shares in the company’s IPO It has been detected.
