Ethos has raised a $22.75M Series A led by a16z to rebuild the expert-network business around voice onboarding and AI matching, going directly at incumbents GLG, Third Bridge, and AlphaSights. General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic joined the round. The London startup says it is already on track for eight-figure annualized revenue and is taking 30% or more as a per-project fee, depending on scope.
Roughly 35,000 invited experts are joining the platform each week, according to Ethos, though it would not disclose total network size or name clients. The customer list, the company said, includes top hedge funds, private equity firms, foundational AI labs, and enterprise consulting shops — the same buyers that have historically paid GLG and AlphaSights for hourly calls with named experts.
The pitch is that legacy networks and LinkedIn match on shallow signals — job titles and company names — and miss the actual skills buyers want. Ethos runs experts through a voice-led onboarding interview that asks broader, curated questions about sub-specializations, then layers in public sources like blogs and academic papers. The result, the company says, is that a pharma client can search for doctors who specialize in a given area and have also published on it or worked on drug development.
Key facts
- 01Ethos raised $22.75M in a Series A led by a16z, with General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic participating.
- 02The London company takes 30% or more per project and says it is on track for eight-figure annualized revenue.
- 03Roughly 35,000 invited experts are joining the platform each week.
- 04Founders James Lo (ex-McKinsey, SoftBank) and Daniel Mankowitz (ex-DeepMind) started Ethos in 2024 and run an eight-person team.
- 05Clients include top hedge funds, private equity firms, foundational AI labs, and enterprise consulting firms.
"I think voice is the original form of human communication. Most people, you know, most people don't know how to write their story down in a very succinct, compelling, and accurate way. Voice is a big unlock for Ethos," a16z's Anish Acharya told TechCrunch.
“Ethos is taking 30% or more per project, runs on eight-figure annualized revenue, and says roughly 35,000 people join its expert network each week.”— Jaeden Schafer
James Lo and Daniel Mankowitz founded Ethos in 2024. Lo previously worked at McKinsey and at SoftBank, where he was involved in the transformation of WeWork and Arm. Mankowitz was an AI researcher at DeepMind, where he contributed to YouTube's video compression algorithm, Gemini, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm.
"Traditional expert platforms almost purely focus on a mixture of job titles and job descriptions. What we observe is that most clients and most employers are not looking for a job title company. They're looking for a specific skill and a specific capability," Lo said. He added that the search for skill and capability "is going to gradually merge between the human economy and the agent economy."
The biggest tailwind, in Lo's telling, is the AI labs themselves. To build vertical models in law, health, finance, and management, the labs need structured access to humans who actually do those jobs — for training data, evaluations, and product feedback. That is a buyer Ethos can sell to today, and a reason to map talent at scale before someone else does.
"Our perspective here is the AI labs have — are pointing a giant capital gun at every economically valuable occupation in the world. They're trying to map out every profession. And so that's an amazing tailwind for us," Lo said.
Competition is not just from the legacy networks. Listen Labs and Outset already sell conversational AI for interviews, and any expert-network incumbent could bolt voice onboarding onto an existing user base much faster than Ethos can build one from scratch. Ethos's bet is that the network it is curating — and the depth of the resulting profiles — is the moat, not the voice interface itself. With only eight people on staff, the company is also betting it can scale supply through invitations rather than paid acquisition.
The unknowns are familiar ones for expert networks: compliance risk when buyers are hedge funds, churn among experts who never take a paid call, and the question of whether AI lab demand is a durable revenue line or a 2026 spike. Ethos has not disclosed how many of its 35,000 weekly signups convert into billable experts, and "eight-figure annualized revenue" covers a range from $10M to $99M.
Ethos is one of the cleaner examples of a startup selling picks and shovels to the AI labs while also undercutting an analog incumbent on its core business. If the labs really are trying to map every profession, the companies that own structured access to those professionals — with consent, contracts, and a billing relationship already in place — become quietly strategic. a16z is paying $22.75M to find out whether Ethos is one of them.
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