Ethos, the AI-powered consultancy platform, has emerged from stealth with a $3.5m funding round backed by General Catalyst.
Founded by Daniel J. Mankowitz, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind, and James Lo, a serial entrepreneur who’s previously worked for Mckinsey and SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Ethos is an online search platform and marketplace connecting experts with corporate clients.
The founders told Sifted they wanted to automate and improve the process for finding expertise, allowing clients to access people with niche specialisms at speed. Users can also conduct paid expert calls via its platform, which can be recorded and supplemented with AI-generated audio transcripts.
“If you imagine you’re looking for something fairly basic, like someone who understands R&D tax credits, right now if you Google a question like this, it’s actually really hard to figure out who has that specific expertise, who serves similar clients to you, who’s credible and all these types of things,” Lo told Sifted.
“Our algorithm works by letting you describe exactly what you need, and by drawing on all the public web data — websites, profiles and so on — to help you find the right consultant.”
For now, Ethos is focused on helping private equity firms, hedge funds and management consultants bring in outside knowledge, but the company said it will soon start matching advisors to startups, speakers to conferences and talent to companies.
Mankowitz, who spent years working on DeepMind’s game-playing AI tool AlphaZero, explained where his technical skills had come into play building Ethos.
“When you’re searching for a specific type of expertise, it’s a mix of the AI trying to understand what kind of industries and companies are relevant for your query, mixed with all the different domain heuristics we’ve developed internally, to find exactly the top 10 people for you to talk to out of these millions of profiles,” he said.
“The art of it is how we leverage AI with data, and mix it together with all these heuristics, to find you the perfect set of people to answer your query.”
Alongside General Catalyst, the four-person company’s backers also include US-based investment firm 8VC, as well as Pushmeet Kohli and Oriol Vinyals, both world-leading AI researchers at Google DeepMind.
