SelectQuote

Healthtech / insurance marketplaceUSA

New to Unitard

📉 Public < $1B

Peak $4.4 BillionRecorded estimate

~-96%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2020
📈
Peak valuation
$4.4 Billion ’20
💔
Became a Unitard
2021
💸
Last valuation estimate
~$176M

Current status

Public (NYSE: SLQT)

The rise & fall

6 moments · 1985–2025

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

1985

Founded as a phone-based insurance agency

Agents compare term-life policies by telephone, decades before the Medicare pivot.

Wikipedia

May 2020

The peak: IPO pops toward $4.4B$4.4B

Prices at a $3.25B valuation and jumps on debut — unicorn status and the peak in one move — as Medicare Advantage comparison-selling has its moment.

Insurance Journal

2021

The persistency reckoning

A cohort-and-tail accounting adjustment reveals policyholders lapsing faster than modeled; earnings and the stock crater.

Insurance Journal

2021

Slips out of the club

The market cap drops below $1B as the persistency assumptions unravel.

stockanalysis

2022–25

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–25

Glassdoor reviews from the years after the crash centered on the seasonal churn of the agent model — hiring waves before the fall Medicare-enrollment window, post-season culls and steep pay cuts after — plus repeated commission restructures reviewers said shrank take-home pay, and performance metrics that kept shifting.

May 2025

DOJ kickback suit

The Justice Department sues major Medicare Advantage brokers, SelectQuote among them, alleging illegal carrier kickbacks.

DOJ

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

SelectQuote is an online insurance marketplace, best known for selling Medicare Advantage and life-insurance policies through agents and comparison tools, and its May 2020 IPO popped to value it around $4.4B.

Like its peer GoHealth, its model depended on commission and policy-persistency assumptions that deteriorated: a 2021 cohort-and-tail adjustment exposed lower-than-expected policy retention, and the stock cratered, falling about 96% to roughly $150M.

Source: Insurance Journal / Nasdaq / stockanalysis ($3.25B IPO valuation May 2020, jumped to ~$4.4B; policy-persistency 'cohort' adjustment hit shares 2021; ~$157M market cap by 2026, -96%)

Who ran it

Tim Danker
CEO (since 2017)
Still there — Chief Executive OfficerLinkedIn ↗

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-19. See our methodology.

Disclosed investors (6)

Historical funding participation; lists may be incomplete and do not establish current ownership or investor losses.

* Lead in a funding round · Crunchbase ↗ · 2026-10-13 · Methodology · Leaderboard