Ethos raises $22.75 million from a16z to build an expert network…

Team S · 2026-05-07T14:41:32.000Z

London-based Ethos has raised $22.75 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic. The company is building an AI-powered expert network as an alternative to platforms like GLG, Third Bridge, and Alphasights — tackling what it sees as a quality problem on both sides of the market. Ethos was founded in 2024 by James Lo and Daniel Mankowitz. Lo previously worked at McKinsey and SoftBank, where he worked on transformations of companies including WeWork and Arm. Mankowitz is a former AI researcher at DeepMind, where he worked on YouTube's video compression algorithm, Gemini, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm. The two approached the expert network problem from complementary angles — Lo wanting to connect people with the right economic opportunities, Mankowitz seeing the economy as a knowledge graph of people, companies, and products that the right algorithms can optimise. The company's central innovation is voice-based onboarding. Rather than asking experts to fill in a form based on job title — the standard approach on legacy platforms — Ethos uses AI voice agents to conduct interviews, asking a broader set of curated questions that surface knowledge and skills that job titles don't capture. This richer data then allows Ethos to match companies with experts using natural language queries, such as finding doctors who specialise in a given area but have also published papers on drug development, or people who worked at a funded startup by top-tier investors solving for finance automation. The platform also pulls in public sources such as blogs, academic papers, and social signals. Ethos is currently onboarding around 35,000 experts per week and counts top hedge funds, private equity firms, leading AI labs, and enterprise consulting firms among its clients. It takes 30% or more as a per-project fee and is on track for eight-figure annualised revenue. The company has eight people on its team and plans to stay lean as it scales, with AI labs' drive to map human talent across every major profession described by Lo as a significant structural tailwind for the business.

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Ethos raises $22.75 million from a16z to build an expert network… | Newnex