Ethos Life Insurance Files for IPO - September 26, 2025

Ethos filed their S-1 this morning, and I'm reading through it thinking there's gotta be a catch. But nope - they're actually profitable. $184.2 million in revenue for H1 2025, up 55.3% year-over-year.

For context, I've covered maybe 20 insurtech companies and exactly zero of them turned a profit before going public. Most are burning through Series C money faster than a crypto bro during the 2021 bull run.

Their whole thing? Skip the medical exam bullshit. You know how buying life insurance normally works - fill out 47 forms, wait 3 weeks, pee in a cup, have some nurse come to your house at 7am to measure your blood pressure. Ethos said "fuck that" and built algorithms that approve you in 15 minutes using public records and a questionnaire shorter than a Starbucks order.

$31 Million in Profit (Not Revenue, Actual Profit)

$31.2 million in net income for H1 2025, up 64% from last year. Let me repeat that - profit, not revenue. Real money they can actually keep.

Root Insurance went public at $10 billion, then their stock crashed 95% when investors realized they were losing money on every customer. Lemonade keeps promising profitability "next quarter" but still burns $50M every quarter. Ethos apparently figured out you should charge more for insurance than you pay out in claims. Revolutionary stuff.

They picked "LIFE" as their ticker symbol. Cute. Either brilliant marketing or the kind of obvious choice that makes you groan. Probably both.

What's wild is the timing - seven insurance companies have gone public since May. Either this is insurance tech's moment or we're watching bubble 2.0 unfold in real time.

Google Ventures Wrote Them a Check

GV is an investor, which means something. They've backed Uber, Airbnb, Stripe - not exactly known for funding obvious disasters. When Google's venture arm writes you a check, it's validation that someone with actual money thinks your business model isn't completely fucked.

But here's where it gets tricky. Any algorithm can approve a healthy 25-year-old software engineer for life insurance. The real money is pricing risk correctly for a 52-year-old chain smoker with Type 2 diabetes. That's where 150 years of actuarial tables still beat machine learning models trained on public records.

The market timing isn't terrible either. Millennials hit their 30s, have kids, buy houses, and suddenly realize they're mortal. Shocking development. Traditional insurers still act like it's 1995 - their websites look like shit, their applications take forever, and they make you talk to agents who sound like they're reading from scripts written during the Bush administration.

Ethos might be the first insurtech that actually makes sense. They figured out unit economics instead of just burning VC money on Facebook ads. Whether public investors agree is another story - they've been burned by too many "revolutionary" insurance companies that turned out to be just expensive customer acquisition machines with pretty apps.

Ethos is jumping into the $787 billion life insurance market at exactly the right moment. The global insurtech market hit $60.8 billion in Q2 2025, showing massive investor appetite for insurance technology. Why? Because traditional life insurance companies have spent decades perfecting the art of making it as painful as possible to buy their product. Only 54% of Americans have life insurance, and it's not because they don't need it.

Here's what buying life insurance used to look like: fill out a 20-page application, schedule a medical exam, pee in a cup, get your blood drawn, wait 6-8 weeks for approval, then get denied because you forgot to mention that time you sprained your ankle in college. Traditional insurers are still living in 1995.

Ethos has real competition though. Ladder, Haven Life (owned by MassMutual), and Bestow are all trying to fix the same broken process. Insurtech funding surged 90% in Q1 2025, with investors pouring money into companies trying to modernize insurance. The difference? Ethos built a platform that works for customers, agents, AND insurance carriers. That's three revenue streams instead of one, which is either genius or overly complicated - we'll find out.

Their Tech Actually Seems to Work (Shocking, I Know)

The real question is whether their underwriting algorithms actually work. Ethos claims they can approve applications in minutes instead of weeks by using "alternative data sources" - which probably means they're scraping your social media, checking your fitness tracker data, and cross-referencing public records. Creepy? Maybe. Effective? Studies suggest yes.

Traditional carriers like State Farm and Northwestern Mutual are still using systems built when Y2K was a real concern. They require medical exams because that's how they've always done it, not because it's the best way to assess risk. Modern actuarial science can predict your health outcomes better from public data than from a single blood test.

The Timing is Perfect (Or Terrible, Depending on Your Perspective)

Ethos is going public during an insurance IPO hot streak - six companies since May. Either investors finally realized insurance tech isn't boring, or we're at the peak of another bubble. The insurtech market is projected to reach $95.32 billion by 2033, growing at a massive 30.34% CAGR. Historical note: financial services IPOs tend to cluster right before market corrections.

The real test? Scaling their algorithms without breaking them. It's one thing to approve healthy 25-year-olds in Silicon Valley. It's another to handle volume while maintaining accuracy across different demographics and health profiles. Lemonade learned this the hard way in home insurance.

What Happens Next (Spoiler: Nobody Really Knows)

Ethos could expand into disability insurance, health insurance, or financial planning. Their customer data gives them a head start. But every insurance product is different - life insurance algorithms won't necessarily work for auto or health.

The regulatory environment is slowly modernizing, with state commissioners finally allowing tech-enabled underwriting. Deloitte forecasts 3.3% premium growth in the insurance industry for 2025, driven by digital transformation. But insurance regulation moves at the speed of government, which is roughly the speed of continental drift.

Bottom line: Ethos has to prove they can grow without blowing up their unit economics. Most insurtech companies burn cash trying to acquire customers faster than they can figure out how to underwrite them profitably. We'll see if being public changes that equation.