When companies seek input and advice on a project, they tend to turn to LinkedIn or tap into professional networks like GLG, Third Bridge, and AlphaSights. However, searches often fail to yield high-quality input.
Currently, these sites ask professionals to fill out a form based on their job title and use that information to match them with companies that need help.
London-based Ethos believes AI can improve both aspects of this experience. For professionals, we offer voice onboarding to ask broader questions and get more data about knowledge in different areas that your job title doesn’t cover. For enterprises, Ethos can better match the natural language queries submitted by these organizations for their projects thanks to the extensive data it collects.
Ethos says its voice-based onboarding and data allows it to answer complex customer questions such as “Look for someone who worked at a startup funded by an A-grade investor that aims to automate finance.”
Another example the company gave was how drug companies can use its platform to search for doctors who specialize in a particular field, have written papers on the topic, or have an understanding of drug development.
Today, Ethos announced a $22.75 million Series A round led by a16z with participation from General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic.
Anish Acharya of a16z believes that traditional platforms like LinkedIn and GLG only display shallow signals with job titles. He believes Ethos captures a variety of subspecialties through an audio interview process with carefully selected questions.
“I think voice is the natural form of human communication. Most people don’t know how to write down their stories in a very concise, compelling and accurate way. Voice is a big key to Ethos,” Acharya told TechCrunch over the phone.
How Ethos is expanding your network
Ethos was founded in 2024 by James Lo and Daniel Mankowitz. Lo previously worked at McKinsey and later at SoftBank, where he worked on transforming companies such as WeWork and Arm. Mankowitz worked as an AI researcher at DeepMind, where he worked on YouTube’s video compression algorithm, Gemini, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm.
The two founders ended up approaching the problem from different angles in building their professional network. Law has always wanted to work on providing people with decent economic and employment opportunities. Mankowitz believed that the economy is a knowledge graph of people, companies, and products, and that with the right algorithms, these entities can be matched against each other.
“Traditional expert platforms focus almost purely on job title and job description combinations. What we’ve observed is that most clients and employers aren’t looking for a company with a job title; they’re looking for specific skills and specific competencies. We’ve also observed that over time, the search for skills and competencies gradually merges between the human economy and the agent economy,” Lo said.
Beyond data provided by experts, Ethos also looks at other public sources such as blogs and academic articles, along with social links to match companies with the right talent.
The company also conducts interviews and extracts insights through its proprietary platform using voice agents. Startups like Listen Labs and Outset are already offering ways for companies to use conversational AI for interviews, offering some competition on this front. But Ethos believes its network of experts is better suited for certain customers than its competitors.
Ethos did not name its customer base, but said top hedge funds, private equity firms, major fundamental AI labs and enterprise consulting are already using its product. Depending on the nature of the project, companies charge fees of 30% or more per project. The company said it was on track for “8-digit annualized sales,” but declined to provide specific numbers.
He did not say how many professionals are on the platform, but said about 35,000 people join each week. (Ethos sends invitations to people who we think could benefit from Ethos.)
One of the challenges for the startup is to grow its expert user base relevant to its clients. The company said its AI research lab, which is investing money to map human talent, supports that goal.
“Our perspective here is that the AI Institute is pointing a huge capital gun at every economically valuable profession in the world. They’re going to plan every profession, and that’s an incredible tailwind for us,” Lo said.
He said these institutes are building professional services in the fields of law, health, finance and management, so they want all kinds of experts in these networks to build models and get feedback on products and strategies.
The company’s team currently has eight people, and the goal is to keep the team compact while scaling.
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