Ethos bets voice-captured skills beat job titles; a16z leads $22.75M expert network

Ethos is a London expert-network startup founded in 2024 by James Lo, a former McKinsey and SoftBank operator, and Daniel Mankowitz, a former DeepMind AI researcher who worked on Gemini and AlphaDev. Instead of asking experts to submit a resume, it runs structured AI voice interviews that capture sub-specializations, domain knowledge and capabilities that job titles do not encode.

Clients then pose natural-language queries - 'find people who worked at a funded startup backed by A-grade investors solving finance automation' - and Ethos matches them against that richer profile data, drawing on public sources such as papers and social links as well. The pitch is that legacy players like LinkedIn and GLG only see shallow title-based signals.

In May 2026 Ethos raised a $22.75M Series A led by a16z, with General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital and Common Magic. It reports roughly 35,000 experts joining per week and says it is on track for an eight-figure annualized revenue, taking 30% or more per project from clients, which include top hedge funds, PE firms, leading AI labs and enterprise consultancies.

The company keeps a deliberately compact team of eight. Founders frame AI labs mapping human talent as a tailwind: the more agents take over professions, the more valuable a verified human-expert graph becomes. Ethos is still scaling with no exit or major pivot reported.