Ethos secures $22.75 million in Series A funding to address the issues AI has caused in the hiring process.

      The London-based AI expert-matching platform, founded by former DeepMind and McKinsey alumni, is currently being valued at a time when AI has noticeably impacted the hiring landscape. Andreessen Horowitz is leading this funding round, with General Catalyst, the initial seed investor, participating again.

      Generative AI has, in just around 30 months, significantly simplified job application processes for candidates while complicating the evaluation process for employers. There is a noticeable imbalance: tools that assist candidates have inundated the market with seamless CVs, polished cover letters, and enhanced portfolios, whereas the tools for recruiters that traditionally help sift through candidates have not evolved at a comparable rate.

      Consequently, by mid-2026, the hiring market will feature a rapid scaling of the cheapest inputs while the most valuable input, the recruiter’s time, gets overwhelmed. Ethos, an AI startup based in London and founded by alumni of Google DeepMind and McKinsey, believes this is a problem worth investing in. On Wednesday, the company announced a Series A funding round of $22.75 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from General Catalyst, XTX, and Evantic.

      This represents one of the larger Series A funding rounds for a UK AI startup this year, indicating how seriously Andreessen Horowitz views the labor-market implications of AI's commercial impact.

      What Ethos actually does

      In simple terms, Ethos operates as an AI-driven expert network. While companies like GLG and Guidepoint have spent many years curating lists of consultants, retired executives, and specialists for paid consultations, Ethos employs AI for this curation process.

      The parallel coverage from TNW on the wider expert-network landscape, particularly in relation to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion enterprise services firm, is relevant here: the rosters of GLG and Guidepoint have become data partners in Claude Opus 4.7. Ethos, according to this evidence, is adopting an opposite approach: instead of integrating existing expert networks into AI products, it creates the expert profiles through AI and then matches them to opportunities at a scale that only a model-based system can manage.

      The mechanism, as outlined on the company’s product page, involves two main components. An Ethos voice agent conducts a detailed interview with each expert, revealing the nuances of their professional knowledge that a standard CV cannot convey. Simultaneously, Ethos’s AI reviews the expert’s existing work portfolio, which includes academic papers, code repositories, blog posts, podcast appearances, and conference talks, to form a comprehensive understanding of the individual’s expertise. This combined profile is then autonomously matched with opportunities from the platform's client base.

      The range of opportunities is notably broad. According to the company, Ethos matches its experts with consulting projects, expert calls, market research surveys, AI data-labeling tasks, and full-time positions. The AI-data aspect is critically important.

      Frontier model labs require high-quality, domain-specific training data, especially in areas where general-purpose web data is inadequate, such as finance, medicine, law, and advanced engineering. Ethos has positioned itself, in its promotional materials, as a conduit through which these labs can access verified domain experts at scale.

      The traction figures mentioned in the announcement are compelling enough, if accurate, to validate the Series A funding. The company claims that over 5,000 experts join the platform weekly from diverse fields including accounting, banking, consulting, law, technology, and healthcare, in addition to skilled trades such as electricians and plumbers.

      The cross-collar reach—integrating white-collar specialists and qualified tradespeople—is unusual for an expert network and aligns with Ethos’s broader message that the value lies in verified expertise, independent of the credentialing path.

      In terms of earnings, the average expert on Ethos earns an additional £4,500 per month through the platform, with the top 10% making over £7,000. Since January, the number of experts earning through Ethos has surged six-fold. An independent review on AItrainer.work reported that Ethos’s per-hour rates range from $105 to $225, which is significantly higher than typical AI-training pay and aligns with the platform’s mid-to-senior level focus.

      Whether these figures remain robust will, as usual in expert-network economics, depend on the sustainability of the underlying customer demand. The economic model of paid expert calls falters if one of three scenarios occurs: the customer base shrinks, the supply of qualified experts exceeds demand, or the AI-driven matching leads to enough successful engagements that it commodifies the experts.

      Ethos is betting that none of these situations will materialize quickly enough to hinder its growth, and it believes that broadening its customer base from private equity and consultancy to include AI labs and corporate research functions will provide significant opportunities.

      The founders and why a16z invested

      Ethos is co-founded by two individuals with complementary backgrounds. James Lo