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

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

The company and its selling shareholders raised nearly $200 million in the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the most nose-diving options in recent memory. The word is equal. Ethos uses a three-pronged platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without a medical exam. 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 itself is not an insurance company — it is a licensed agency that receives commissions on sales.

Although the company’s stock closed its first day as a public company at $16.85, 11% below the $19 IPO price, Ethos co-founders Peter Colis and Lingke Wang still have a lot to celebrate, having grown the 10-year-old business to public market scale.

“When we introduced [the business]there were eight or nine life insurtech startups that looked very similar to Ethos, with the same Series A funding,” Colis 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 received more than $200 million in funding from prominent VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, filed for bankruptcy that year.

Ethos, which has raised more than $400 million in venture capital, could easily have met the same fate. Instead, the company remained focused on profitability as the era of cheap capital and easy fundraising ended in 2022. “Not knowing what the ongoing funding climate was going to be, we were really committed to ensuring profitability,” Colis said.

That financial guidance turned it into a profitable company by mid-2023, according to its IPO filings. Since then, Ethos has maintained an annual revenue growth rate of over 50%. For the nine months ending September 30, 2025, the company generated nearly $278 million in revenue and less than $46.6 million in revenue.

Still, the company ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of about $1.1 billion, far less 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, Colis said a large part of the reason was to bring “more trust and credibility” to potential partners and customers. He explained that because many large insurance carriers are over 100 years old, going public shows a company’s staying power.

Major 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.