Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, 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 precursor to 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 highest buyouts of options in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos runs a three-way platform where consumers buy a policy online in 10 minutes without a medical examination. It says more than 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell those policies and that carriers like Legal & General America and John Hancock rely on it for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos is not an insurer itself – it is a licensed agency earning commission on sales.
Although the company’s stock closed at $16.85 on its first day as a public company, down 11% from its IPO price of $19, Ethos co-founders Peter Collis and Lingke Wang still have a lot to celebrate as they have grown the 10-year-old business to public-market scale.
“When we launched [the business]“There were eight or nine other life insurance startups that looked similar to Ethos, with similar Series A funding,” Collis told TechCrunch.
For example, PolicyGenius, which had 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 over $200 million from major VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy the same year.
Ethos, which has raised more than $400 million in venture capital, could easily suffer a similar fate. Instead, the company remained focused on reaching profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising comes to an end in 2022. “Not knowing what the current funding environment would be, we got really serious about ensuring profitability,” Collis said.
That financial discipline turned it into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to its IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-on-year revenue growth rate of more than 50%. For the nine months ending September 30, 2025, the company generated revenues of approximately $278 million and net income of just under $46.6 million.
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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 that is significantly lower than the $2.7 billion it earned in its last private round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in July 2021.
Asked why Ethos went public, Collis said a big reason was to bring “additional trust and credibility” to potential partners and customers. He pointed out that since many major insurance carriers are more than a century old, being publicly traded indicates a company’s staying power.
Ethos’ largest outside shareholders include major companies, including Sequoia, Accel, Google’s venture arm GV, and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. The company revealed that Sequoia and Accel did not sell shares in the IPO.
