Key Takeaways:
London-based Ethos raised $22.75 million in a Series A round to solve a problem created by artificial intelligence: a hiring market where it is increasingly difficult to tell whether a candidate is actually qualified. The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
"A CV is a poor proxy for what someone is truly capable of," James Lo, co-founder and chief executive of Ethos, said in a statement. “AI is reshaping the labour market faster than our tools for valuing human expertise can keep up. Ethos is built to change that.”
The Series A round saw participation from seed-lead investor General Catalyst, as well as from XTX and Matt Miller's Evantic. Ethos was founded by Lo, a former McKinsey consultant and SoftBank Vision Fund investor, and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Mankowitz, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind who worked on the AlphaZero reinforcement-learning system.
The investment highlights a growing asymmetry in the professional workforce. While AI tools have allowed candidates to generate polished resumes and cover letters, the tools for recruiters to screen for genuine expertise have not advanced at the same pace. Ethos says it is attracting over 5,000 experts weekly, with the average participant earning an additional £4,500 per month.
Ethos tackles this by operating as an AI-driven expert network. Instead of relying on static resumes, the company’s platform uses a voice AI agent to conduct an extended interview with each expert to understand the texture of their knowledge. The system also ingests the expert’s portfolio of work—including academic papers, code repositories, and conference talks—to build a more complete profile.
These AI-generated profiles are then matched with opportunities ranging from consulting calls and market research surveys to full-time roles. The company is also positioning itself as a key supplier of verified domain experts for frontier AI labs, which require high-quality training data in specialized fields like medicine, law, and finance. This model competes with incumbent human-curated networks like GLG and Guidepoint.
The founder pairing of a commercial strategist from McKinsey and SoftBank with a systems-design architect from DeepMind proved to be a compelling combination for a16z, which has a history of backing such teams in enterprise AI. General Catalyst’s decision to follow on from its 2024 seed investment signals strong conviction from its European investing arm, which has also backed Mistral and Helsing.
Still, the company faces risks from the sheer pace of competition in a category where scale confers a powerful data advantage. The quality of its voice AI interview experience is critical to attracting the senior-level professionals it targets, and the company will have to navigate the EU AI Act’s impending high-risk classification for employment-related AI systems. The funding gives Ethos the runway to prove its model can solve the expert-matching bottleneck more effectively than its human-led predecessors.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
