Well, thank you very much. I'm Colin Sebastian, the senior research analyst covering internet and internet services here at Baird. We're really happy to have with us here in our afternoon session from Ethos, Peter Colis, CEO and co-founder, and as well in the audience, we have Chris Capozzi, CFO, and Aaron Turner from Investor Relations. We're going to start off with a brief presentation, I believe, or some slides just to sort of level set on Ethos and the company and the transformative nature of their business. Then we'll shift over to some Q&A. I will ask questions with Peter, but feel free to use the email address on your table to submit questions, and I can read those on your behalf towards the end of the session. Peter, with that, thank you very much for joining us. We're honored to have you here, and I'll let you take it away. Thanks for having me, Colin. Appreciate it. We exist to protect families. We send kids to college. We put food in people's fridge. We pay people's mortgages. It's an incredibly important Getting an echo. It's an incredibly important mission to be a part of. Life insurance is a cornerstone of families' financial resources. The company has been on a steep growth trajectory. The past three years we've delivered over 50% growth annually. Last quarter, we grew over 100%. The guidance we put out in Q1 was for 45% for the year. We have a highly efficient model where not only are we EBITDA and cash flow profitable, but we also have very efficient cash unit economics being variable cash positive by month two of a policy's life with us on a fully burdened basis, which allows us to recycle capital quickly and grow efficiently. We have a very differentiated model within the life insurance industry. It's most analogous to an MGA, if you're familiar with insurance. Effectively, we're responsible for not only the distribution and selling of life insurance, but also the underwriting and administration of life insurance. We make binding risk decisions, and we manage the policy over its life. Think of it as all the operations and functions of a carrier partner, except for the balance sheet and investment management component of the business. We like this business model because we're asset capital light while retaining full operational control and having built a full end-to-end technology platform that satisfies all these various operations. We have a great portfolio of carrier partners that we work with who guarantee 100% of the risk. We have no economics at risk on a mortality basis. We have a three-sided technology platform that serves three different constituents. The first and foremost is the clients. We've reported over 600,000 policies have been activated on our platform. Second are the selling agents. We go to market both through D2C, but also through the third-party independent agent business. We reported that in 2025, we had over 15,000 agents on our platform. Carrier partners who we help grow responsibly, delivering incremental growth for those partners at their target ROEs. Underneath these three constituents is a completely end-to-end digitally native and Ethos-owned proprietary underwriting technology platform, including things like underwriting engine, admin system, payments and commissions infrastructure, agent operating system, application engine, et cetera. This allows us to move at a very different velocity and speed than a typical life insurance carrier burdened by legacy infrastructure and technology. The value proposition that we deliver is very unique to all three parties. To clients, we deliver a 10-minute purchase journey. 95% of the time, it's an instant underwriting process, and they can buy a policy there on the spot. We approve over 90% of clients, some of the highest approval rates in the industry, and we've compiled a broad buy box with products specific for different kinds of risk like prime, mid-market, mass market, pre-existing health conditions, seniors, investment feature policies, et cetera. We offer competitive pricing. For agents, the value proposition is even stronger because for the clients, they compress this 10-week purchase journey of medical exams and blood tests into 10 minutes online. The agents have to go through that sales cycle all day, every day. For them, it's transformative because they free up so much more time to prospect for more clients, and they can sell so many more policies than they otherwise would. We have a whole digital operating system available for those agents. You can think of it as analogous to Uber for Uber drivers, where they sign up, they can buy leads from Ethos. The Ethos CRM will market to their clients on their behalf. They can just send out a link, and the client can self-convert, or they can control the sales process. They get paid the next day, so they can reinvest their earnings into more lead buying and prospecting activities. For the carriers, as I mentioned, we really deliver scaled incremental growth at their target underwriting profitability margins. Powering all this advantage is our ability to instantly underwrite people. We've developed a revolutionary process where we absorb around 200,000 data points in real time per client. We transform that structured and unstructured data into an information graph, then we compute that information graph into a pricing decision instantly. To compute that, we apply around 40,000 rules of logic per applicant from a bank of over 1 million rules of logic. This process is heavily audited both by our human underwriting team, who will go and after the fact pull people's medical exams and re-underwrite them as a human traditionally would, and our carrier's human underwriting teams who audit both our engine and our human underwriting team's audits and results. This informs our pricing and underwriting rules on a go-forward basis. It is an incredible market opportunity. Today, Ethos is a low single-digit percent of the U.S. life market. Every single year, 10 million Americans buy individual life insurance, meaning not including through employers. It is a reoccurring, constantly replenishing TAM based on people going through life events of having kids, getting married, buying houses, and taking out debt, watching their parents age, having a health scare. All these things prompt people into the buyer pool for life insurance, and Ethos is the most efficient way for them to get protected and the most efficient way for an agent to sell. With that, we can go to questions. Great. That's a great overview, Peter. Thank you. Maybe kicking off from that point, I assume there are some of you in the audience who are fairly new to the story, maybe we've all seen some of the Ethos ads. There's more to the platform, obviously, which you talked about. How would you describe the value that you provide to those different constituents? Are you more of the D2C life insurance platform for consumers, more about agent and carrier enablement, or more about data and analytics? I think three things really separate us in the industry. One is the vertically integrated nature, because if you think about life insurance carriers themselves are not that vertically integrated. They've got an agent and a PDF application and a full manual underwriting process sitting between them and their client. We are completely vertically integrated. We are completely native technology owned and fully digital, and we deliver a differentiated underwriting experience. All three of those things make us a very unique and different thing within our industry from anything else. I think about us as a high NPS, high net promoter score, vertically integrated, very differentiated value proposition for clients, agents, and scaled incremental growth for carriers. Does that change over time in terms of where you add more value, or is it really about those pieces all accreting sort of together? It's been consistent, and Ethos is a business where we just constantly keep tweaking this highly automated, 98% gross margin engine and just making it more efficient and more efficient and delivering more value proposition to each of the three parties, right? As we've gotten larger, we've gotten better. Prices have improved. Our take rates have improved. The approval rates have improved. The speed to purchase has improved. The efficiency of an agent to sell has improved. The product portfolio has broadened. The carrier's underwriting profitability remains at target. It's constantly refining this engine that gets more intelligent as it accumulates more data and gets larger. Now, you mentioned the Q1 results growing over 100%, and I think direct was, well, it was quite a bit higher than that. What's driving the outperformance, and how are you thinking about the scalability of direct given some of the return on ad spend benchmarks- Yeah. milestones that you have? Yeah, it's a great question. If I take a step back, life insurance today is less than 10% of life insurance sold is sold through direct. Ethos is the leader in direct. I think we really have this opportunity to do what GEICO or Progressive did, where they really simplified a complex and otherwise burdensome experience that had to be sold through agents. They made it easily available online. Today, direct is half of the auto market in the U.S. I think that Ethos will push direct and increase its share as a percent of the market over time. Implicit in that is today, there is no GEICO and Progressive in life insurance. There is no established mass market, mass affluent middle-market brand that exists. We are building this category out for the first time. We're the first with the unit economics to be able to do it, which has been a 10-year journey of iterations and optimizations and a million tweaks behind the scenes to get the underwriting algorithms right to approve enough people at good enough prices with enough profitability for carrier partners, retain clients who are paying, make it a really high converting checkout experience, have a product for almost everyone so we don't lose people in the process. Lastly, have really efficient, effective marketing, both more brand marketing as well as performance marketing to drive people in the door. I think everything in that vertical chain has continuously improved over time. If you look at what's remarkable about those Q1 results, we grew direct over 130% year-over-year at commensurate unit economics with the year previous. I think where we've been positively surprised in the direct business is as we've shifted more of our marketing spend from bottom-of-funnel search and affiliate channels where people are looking for life insurance into more top-of-funnel channels like television, radio, social media, YouTube, et cetera, that the ratio between our unit economic improvements and our ability to increase marketing spend has been non-linear. We're really excited about having the model to go build that next great brand in life insurance and own the category. Yeah, I'm going to return to marketing in a minute, but when you think about or when you've watched the evolution of Ethos since the founding, are the muscles more in engineering and you developed the marketing and customer acquisition side or was it the reverse or both? I think we had to do three things really well. One, and first and foremost, was technology. The second was risk management from an insurance standpoint. We have incredible actuarial and underwriting IP development teams. The third is distribution intuition. All three of those things were necessary conditions to succeed. When we launched, there were nine other identical startups that looked like us. Eight of the nine are shuttered, pivoted, or acqui-hired, and they failed at one, two, or three of those things. They didn't have the technology capabilities to vertically integrate, they didn't have the risk management abilities to balance growth and profitable growth for carriers, or they just never knew how to unit economically effectively sell life insurance, which is a hard thing to do. Now, with the direct business accelerating, it looks like the mix shift might skew more towards direct over time. Is that the right way to think about it? What will be the core driver of growth long term? In Q1, there's a unique seasonality aspect to direct where with New Year's resolutions and people being in the mind of bettering themself, they're more willing to buy life insurance through our direct channel. I think for the rest of the year, usually see around two-third, we've got it kind of around two-thirds direct, one-third third party. It's hard to predict what the mix looks like years out from now. We are trying to grow both as quickly as we can. We're not capital constraining either, and they don't exist as a trade-off to each other because both are great contribution margined, variable cash positive within month two of a policy's life. All right, let's talk about data. One of the favorite topics of this conference. Obviously, you do a lot of underwriting. You do the underwriting, which requires the ingestion of a lot of data into your algorithms. Can you talk a little bit more about how that works, the role that data analytics, machine learning play in that process? I have a couple of follow-ups then on that. It's a great question. Our underwriting engine is an incredibly sophisticated piece of technology. Per client, we absorb around 200,000 data points. No two clients are the same, no two sets of data are the same. We apply 40,000 algorithmic rules. Again, no set of rules are the same that we apply among any two clients. Our engine has the ability not only to underwrite younger, healthier people, but people who are older with more complex risks, pre-existing health conditions, all sorts of stuff as life happens. It's a time-tested and scale-tested solution that's heavily audited, and it does get more efficient the larger it gets. That's been an incredible data advantage for us. The second is, as we bring in more clients, we have the ability to run more user experience optimization tests, conversion rate tests, and further refine the end-to-end purchasing journey. The third is, as we sell more through agents and we bring more agents onto the platform, we identify more product opportunities for what's the next product we're going to build to serve the market. I think, what is it, 10 minutes to get a decision on average? Yeah. That's remarkable. I think that compares to what? Two weeks, three weeks? 5-10 weeks. 5 -10 weeks. Okay. Underestimated by a little bit. Within that sort of data analysis, that ingestion of data, the algorithms, what's the hardest part to replicate if you think about that as one of your modes? The translation layer that turns all that data into the right information graph, then the rules and logic to compute it into a pricing decision. The engine's intelligent enough to reconcile differences between what the applicant is telling us in the application and what we're observing in the back-end data in real time, and probe and question the applicant to either get to the truth or elicit more information that can help refine the decision. It's not a static model. It's a highly adaptive model to observing the situation. You touched on marketing a little bit earlier, let's maybe dig in a little bit there. Lots of changes in search and in how consumers are discovering new products and services and even the distribution over time of those services. Can you talk about your observations on how that market is changing and how you're adapting to that and the implications for customer acquisition cost? Yeah, we're really excited about the opportunity for AI to play a critical component in how clients search and research life insurance. I think we are best positioned to take advantage of it, both organic LLM traffic as clients do their own research. We have a great GEO optimization effort to ensure that Ethos is a highly recommended source of information and a great company that's recommended as they're considering their life insurance options. As LLMs consider monetizing that traffic, I think our unit economics and our digital marketing prowess will allow us to be the most effective acquirer of traffic through those channels in the same way that we have been through other channels like paid search. I think when you think about the transformative nature of LLMs, if more clients are doing research with LLMs versus partnering with agents, I think our direct business will most benefit from that of anyone in the industry. When you think about the ability to integrate parts of the purchasing journey into those LLMs as the totally native digital platform, I think we are also best positioned to partner with these LLMs for a more integrated acquisition experience if that day comes. We announced a ChatGPT app about a month ago. That's off to a nice start. It's still very early days, but we're excited to just keep experimenting and always be on the forefront of experimentation as AI keeps growing. Okay. Now, maybe the other side of Gen AI, does that change the competitive risks or the dynamic around direct-to-consumer for life insurance? I think our model is very difficult to replicate with or without AI. If you think about the scale of automated underwriting data, which is not the same thing as manual underwriting data from a data mode perspective, when you think about the totally owned end-to-end native platform that no other carrier has, right? Carriers live on these fractured, third-party vendor managed legacy technology stacks with non-integrated data infrastructures, et cetera. I think we have both a different data advantage, we have a different platform and technology advantage, and then we have the right capabilities and skill sets within Ethos exactly for what we're doing. I think that's hard to replicate in the industry. Looking maybe at the carriers and their strategy medium term, long term, clearly they are a value partner of yours and from what we know, they value that relationship. What happens over time? Is there a risk that they decide to leverage some of this technology and go direct themselves? It's a great question. Our technology and IP is unique to us, and it's not owned by our carrier partners. Many carriers have tried going direct. Northwestern Mutual, John Hancock, Prudential, MassMutual, and many others. They've all launched and then shuttered direct-to-consumer initiatives themselves. For all the reasons that we've discussed, it's a hard thing to do. I am long our ability to continue winning and capturing that direct market. I'm going to interject a couple of audience questions. You can feel free to still throw them out here. With your algorithm, are you limited to life insurance or are there other policies that can leverage the same platform? It's a great question. I'll talk more broadly about our technology platform than just our underwriting. I think our underwriting or our platform has been built in an agnostic way enough that it could be easily transferable to supplementary health products, annuities, and other products without too much reconfiguration or adaptation work. We're excited to amortize that platform with both more life insurance and non-life insurance products in the future. Is that diversification also true for carriers or is it more about policy diversification? It is adaptable to carriers, correct. There's not a huge incremental cost to bring on more carriers from a technology perspective to Ethos. Okay. Another question from the audience. I noticed you're not available in New York. That's a great question. The New York State Department of Financial Services has a different regulatory framework than the other states in the U.S. and so a lot of life insurance companies are not available or operate in New York. I'd say probably the majority of them don't. It just hasn't been the number one priority for us relative to our other opportunities. We hope to one day serve New York. What percentage of the country are you available in now? 49 states. Okay. I think you mentioned this earlier, your market share? Low single digits- Low single digits. of the U.S. life market. Right. Okay. We have a long runway to keep compounding at above market rates. Right? The life insurance industry grows 3% a year, I think we'll be able to compound at above market rates for a long time. When you introduce a new product, how long does it take typically, and maybe it's too early, but for those to scale to be material in the business? It depends. From a forecasting perspective, we place very little value on new or nascent products in future projections. We really want to see it before we pencil it in. Oftentimes there's a period of iteration and learning. Our Accumulation Indexed Universal Life product that we launched in Q4 is off to a very nice, healthy, and contributing start. We're quite excited about that. The whole life insurance product that we launched with Banner last quarter is off to a very nice start as well. The cancer insurance product we launched with Aflac, we're more iterating on that one. It's still early days. It kind of depends. What's interesting is if you look at our direct business, you look at Q1 year-over-year, that growth came from pretty much the same product portfolio as we had a year earlier in direct. Our direct business is more weighted to term life insurance. Our third-party business is more weighted to whole life and indexed universal life insurance. Got it. Same store sales drives the vast majority of the growth. Yeah. Same product sales. Okay. I did want to go back to the new products in terms of what influences your decision there. Are agents coming to you and suggesting products? Is it the data that you're seeing, the way consumers are searching or using the platform? Is it carriers? Then, as a follow-up to that, what is the strategy or what have you seen thus far in your ability to cross-sell different products? It's a great question. In the agent business, it's awesome because they say, "Hey, I love you for product X and Y. I also sell a lot of product Z with this other carrier, but they don't have a great, fast, easy process and technology like you have. If you built me product Z, I would bring this much amount of production to you this quickly." We validate how universal is that need, but it makes the roadmap very clear for our third-party business. Our agency partners are incredible partners in that respect. On the direct side, it is more evaluating of the data of where is our offering the weakest, where do we think we can increase the value proposition to the end client, or what thesis do we have about other products that are tangential and interrelated, like cross-selling cancer insurance or accidental death insurance. We also sell wills and estates, estate planning, wills and trusts, estate planning to clients, and we make it free for people that buy our life insurance. We have a nascent opportunity where we're now selling annuities direct. There's more experimentation in iterating into the right value proposition for the client there. Are the unit economics for those new products typically within the same range, or how do you think about that? We're more forgiving in the early days as we just iterate and figure out, is there a there there? Can it really get to something that's really scaled and contributory? Eventually, we would like great unit economics for all of them. All right. I'm going to turn to a couple more audience questions. How does policy pricing generally compare to your competitors? If you look at a prime term product that's most comparable to industry term products, we are best quartile if you were to stack rank carriers in a row. In that, there's give and takes for automating away costs, extra conservatism for automated underwriting, elasticity of the end client. We try to be very fair and attractive pricing for clients and deliver an incredible 10-minute purchase experience, because a lot of people otherwise just won't buy life insurance. Can you ask about the, or I'll ask you about the underwriting track record of the platform? Yeah. We've now activated over 600,000 policies, and we've underwritten many more cases than that in partnership with a lot of carriers. Our carriers are generally very happy with our risk and are asking for more production from us. We do not have balance sheet capacity constraints today. We have ample balance sheet with our existing set of partners. Generally, mortality has been well controlled, and whenever we observe hotspots in mortality or persistency, we move to make operational changes or incremental pricing refinements on a go-forward basis. You make an adjustment for those over time as well, as far as the financial implications of that, right? If there are any changes in the underwriting or the effectiveness of the underwriting. It would be reflected in updates to the pricing or commission rates to Ethos. Okay. I guess as our final question, what would you say is the most underappreciated risk and the most underappreciated opportunity? It's a good question. Good CEO question. Yeah. Most underappreciated opportunity, I think it's a massive category, and there's nothing that is like Ethos even remotely in the category. We're so far ahead in all the different ways we've described of technology, business model, sophistication on go to market. I do think that we will wake up in 10 years and be the Progressive or GEICO of this industry. I think it's ours to lose. On most underappreciated risk, this isn't really a risk anymore. It was a hard business to get started. There was a cold start problem initially of convincing carrier partners to partner with us before we had any track record of distributing policies and any track record of managing risk. Both of those were hurdles that we had to convince early partners who were incredible to us. There was a co-learning experience together as we iterated into models that worked unit economically for all parties and were scalable, and as we built out the technology platform underneath. It's a hard business to get started, but now that we have the momentum and scale that we do, it makes it a lot easier for each new incremental carrier partner. All right, we did have time for one last question that came in. In terms of internal uses of generative AI, do you view this as more revenue generating or more about productivity? We're really excited about it as a source of origination for client acquisition. We've seen great productivity gains in the product engineering and design front, which then allows us to run more experiments and ship more features which better improve unit economics and grow. We're rolling that out everywhere internally. In a business like ours, data security and privacy is of the utmost importance, so we've spent a tremendous amount of time to build an AI platform that is safe and responsible to roll it out to employees. Are you using any one of the particular LLMs or cloud platforms for that? We've experimented with most of them. Okay. Yeah. We have more than one right now. That's for my benefit. Yeah. Well, great. Well, thanks a lot, Peter, for joining us. A really amazing story, one of Baird's top small-cap picks, and invite or encourage all of you to take a closer look at Ethos. Thank you. Thanks, Colin. Appreciate it.