Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one in all the 12 months’s first major tech IPOs, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle.
The corporate and its selling shareholders raised roughly $200 million within the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one in all the more on-the-nose selections in recent memory. The name suits. Ethos runs a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without medical exams. It says over 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell those policies and that carriers like Legal & General America and John Hancock depend on it for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos itself isn’t an insurer — it’s a licensed agency earning commissions on sales.
Though the corporate’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 have a good time, having grown the 10-year-old business to public-market scale.
“Once we launched [the business], there have been like eight or nine other life insurtech startups that looked very much like Ethos, with similar Series A funding,” Colis told TechCrunch. “Over time, the overwhelming majority of those startups have pivoted, been acquired at subscale, remain at subscale or gone out of business.”
For example, Policygenius, which raised over $250 million from investors, including KKR and Norwest Enterprise Partners, was acquired by PE-backed Zinnia in 2023. Meanwhile, Health IQ, a startup that secured greater than $200 million from outstanding VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy that very same 12 months.
Ethos, which has raised over $400 million in enterprise capital, could have easily succumbed to an identical fate. As a substitute, the corporate remained laser-focused on reaching profitability because the era of low cost capital and simple fundraising got here to an end in 2022. “Not knowing what the continuing funding climate can be, we got really serious about ensuring profitability,” Colis said.
That financial discipline transformed it right into a profitable company by mid-2023, in response to its IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-over-year revenue growth rate of greater than 50%. In the nine months ending September 30, 2025, the corporate generated almost $278 million in revenue and just below $46.6 million in net income.
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Still, the corporate ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of about $1.1 billion, a valuation that’s significantly below the $2.7 billion it garnered in its last private round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021.
When asked why Ethos went public, Colis said that an enormous a part of the rationale was to bring “additional trust and credibility” to potential partners and clients. He explained that because many major insurance carriers are over a century old, being publicly traded signals the corporate’s endurance.
The most important outside shareholders of Ethos include outstanding firms, including Sequoia, Accel, Google’s enterprise arm GV, and SoftBank, in addition to General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel didn’t sell shares within the IPO, the corporate disclosed.