How Sequoia-backed Ethos reached the public market while rivals fell short

Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the year’s first major tech IPOs, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle.

The company and its selling shareholders raised approximately $200 million in the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the more on-the-nose choices in recent memory. The name fits. 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 rely on it for underwriting and administrative services. Ethos itself isn’t an insurer — it’s a licensed agency earning commissions on sales.

Though 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 business to public-market scale.

“When we launched [the business], there were like eight or nine other life insurtech startups that looked very similar to Ethos, with similar Series A funding,” Colis told TechCrunch. “Over time, the vast majority of those startups have pivoted, been acquired at sub-scale, remain at sub-scale or gone out of business.”

For instance, Policygenius, which 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 more than $200 million from prominent VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy that same year.

Ethos, which has raised over $400 million in venture capital, could have easily succumbed to a similar fate. Instead, the company remained laser-focused on reaching profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising came to an end in 2022. “Not knowing what the ongoing funding climate would be, we got really serious about ensuring profitability,” Colis said.

That financial discipline transformed it into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to its IPO documents. Since then, Ethos has also maintained a year-over-year revenue growth rate of more than 50%. In the nine months ending September 30, 2025, the company generated almost $278 million in revenue and just under $46.6 million in net income.

Still, the company 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 a big part of the reason 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 company’s staying power.

The largest outside shareholders of Ethos include prominent firms including Sequoia, Accel, Google’s venture arm GV, and SoftBank, as well as General Catalyst and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel did not sell shares in the IPO, the company disclosed.