Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of life insurance sales software, went public on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the first big tech IPOs of the year, the insurtech platform is being watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle.
The company and its selling shareholders raised approximately $200 million in a public offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE.” It was one of the more nifty options in recent memory. The name is perfect. Ethos operates a three-sided platform that allows consumers to purchase insurance online in 10 minutes without a medical exam. The company says more than 10,000 independent agents use its software to sell insurance policies, and airlines such as Legal & General America and John Hancock use its software for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos itself is not an insurance company. We are licensed agents who earn a commission from sales.
Although the company’s stock closed on its first day of trading at $16.85, 11% below its public offering price of $19, Ethos co-founders Peter Collis and Linke Wang still have much to celebrate after growing their 10-year-old business to public market size.
“When we launched, [the business]”There were about eight or nine other life insurance tech startups that were very similar to Ethos and had similar Series A funding. Over time, most of those startups pivoted, got acquired at subscale, stayed at subscale, or went out of business,” Collis told TechCrunch.
For example, Policygenius, which raised more than $250 million from investors including KKR and Norwest Venture Partners, was acquired by PE-backed Zinnia in 2023. Meanwhile, Health IQ, a startup that had secured more than $200 million from prominent VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy that same year.
Ethos, which has raised more than $400 million in venture capital, could easily have suffered a similar fate. Instead, the company remained focused on achieving profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy financing comes to an end in 2022. “We worked really hard to ensure profitability because we didn’t know what the current funding environment was going to be,” Collis said.
Its financial discipline turned the company into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-over-year revenue growth rate of over 50%. For the nine months ended September 30, 2025, the company generated revenue 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, significantly lower than 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, Collis said a big part of the reason was to bring “more trust and confidence” to potential partners and customers. He explained that many major insurance companies are over 100 years old, so being listed is a sign of the company’s staying power.
Ethos’ largest outside shareholders include prominent companies such as Sequoia, Accel, Google’s venture arm GV, and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell any shares in the IPO, the company said.
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