London-based Ethos just closed a $22.75 million Series A led by a16z, betting that voice interviews can fix what LinkedIn and legacy expert networks have been getting wrong for years. According to TechCrunch AI, the round also pulled in General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic. The pitch is simple: job titles are a lousy proxy for expertise, and voice is a faster way to surface what someone actually knows.
What Ethos is building
Traditional expert networks like GLG, Third Bridge, and AlphaSights ask experts to fill out a form. Job title in, vague match out. Companies looking for niche knowledge end up sifting through shallow profiles. Ethos flips the workflow with a voice-powered onboarding that asks experts a broader set of curated questions, then mines the answers for sub-specializations the resume never showed.
On the buyer side, Ethos lets companies run natural-language queries against that richer dataset. The startup told TechCrunch AI it can answer prompts like “find me people who worked at a funded startup by A-grade investors solving for finance automation” or surface doctors who both specialize in an area and have published papers on drug development. That’s a different game than keyword-matching a LinkedIn title.
Why a16z is writing the check
a16z partner Anish Acharya put the thesis bluntly to TechCrunch AI: legacy platforms only show shallow signals.
“I think voice is the original form of human communication. 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,” he said.
What stands out here is the founding team. Ethos was started in 2024 by James Lo, formerly of McKinsey and SoftBank, and Daniel Mankowitz, an ex-DeepMind researcher who worked on Gemini, YouTube’s video compression, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm. Lo frames the economy as a problem of matching skills to needs. Mankowitz frames it as a knowledge graph that the right algorithms can untangle.
The traction signals
Ethos isn’t naming clients, but it told TechCrunch AI the platform is already in use at top hedge funds, private equity firms, leading foundational AI labs, and enterprise consulting shops. The business model: Ethos takes 30% or more per project as a fee. The company says it’s tracking toward “an eight-figure annualized revenue,” though it declined to share specifics.
Growth on the supply side is the more interesting number. Ethos says about 35,000 people are joining its expert network each week, mostly via curated invites. The team itself stays lean at eight people, which is the kind of headcount-to-revenue ratio a16z loves to write up.
The AI labs tailwind
Lo made a sharp observation about who’s pulling demand right now:
- AI labs are spending heavily to map every economically valuable occupation
- They need experts in law, health, finance, and management to train and evaluate models
- That demand flows straight into networks like Ethos
“The AI labs are pointing a giant capital gun at every economically valuable occupation in the world,” Lo told TechCrunch AI.
Translation: every model lab racing to build vertical professional-services AI needs human experts to feed and grade those systems. Ethos wants to be the matching layer.
What to watch
Ethos has real competition on the conversational-AI interview front from startups like Listen Labs and Outset. The differentiator it’s banking on is the curated network itself, not just the voice tech. That makes the next 12 months a question of whether Ethos can keep its expert pool growing faster than rivals can copy the voice-onboarding pattern.
The broader signal for the industry: expert networks were one of the last places where a static profile and a phone call still ruled. With a16z putting $22.75M behind a voice-first rebuild, that era looks like it’s closing. Full reporting at the original TechCrunch AI source.