As Ethos Technologies Inc. announces July 21 the close of a $100 million funding round — following the May close of a $200 million funding round — co-founder and CEO Peter Colis said the company is within weeks of securing new office space for its second headquarters here in Austin.
“We’re still in the process,” Colis said, who added that Ethos is working with CBRE. “What we’ve noticed is that the Austin market is tight. But that has not prevented us from growing our team in Austin.”
The San Francisco-based life insurance provider, which also develops software for the life insurance industry, now boasts about 65 local employees. That's up from roughly 40 two and a half months ago, and Colis said Ethos is “on a path to be well over 100 by the end of the year.”
The company is looking to hire in engineering, analytics and data science, customer experience, product design, finance, operations, marketing — “across the board,” Colis said. It employs 200 overall.
Ethos co-founder and President and Chief Technology Officer Lingke Wang moved to Austin several months ago. Chief Revenue Officer Erin Lantz moved to Austin last year. Colis said that he would not rule out having more executives based in the Texas capital in the future.
“We’re very committed to Austin,” he said.
Lantz said in May that the company was looking for an office measuring somewhere between 7,000 square feet and 10,000 square feet. Among the factors being considered are employees’ preferences for how many days they might like to spend in the office per week, the chief revenue officer said.
The company opened its Austin office in 2019, according to BuiltinAustin. It is located near The Arboretum in North Austin.
SoftBanks’s Vision Fund 2 invested the fresh $100 million, which vaulted the company’s valuation to $2.7 billion. It has raised a total of $400 million to date.
Existing investors include Sequoia Capital; Accel; GV, formerly Google Ventures; General Catalyst; Jay-Z's Roc Nation and the investment vehicles of actors Will Smith and Robert Downey Jr.
The company also has an office in Singapore.
Ethos said in the announcement that revenue growth has exceeded 500% year over year. The company said it “expects to issue $20 billion of life insurance coverage” this year. It also announced that its annualized gross profit is approaching $100 million.
“Ethos is leveraging data and its vertically integrated tech stack to fundamentally transform life insurance in the U.S.,” Munish Varma, SoftBank Investment Advisers managing partner, said in a statement. “Through a fast and user-friendly online application process, the company can accurately underwrite and insure a broad segment of customers quickly.”
Colis and Wang founded Ethos in 2016.
