AI consulting startup co-founded by DeepMind scientist lands $22.75M Series A

An AI consulting-cum-recruitment startup co-founded by a Google DeepMind scientist and a SoftBank executive has raised $22.75m, led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz.  

The Series A founding round in Ethos also features participation from General Catalyst, Matt Miller’s Evantic and trading firm XTX. It follows its $3.25m seed round last year led by General Catalyst. The startup has raised around $30m in total.

Ethos, based in London, leverages AI to help foundational AI labs, investment funds and corporates with recruiting experts in specific fields, for consulting and full-time roles.

As well as talking to a candidate via voice-powered AI, the startup’s AI scrutinises a candidate’s portfolio of work, including academic papers, Github repositories, and professional content, matching them up with the expertise that its corporate clients want.  

It says that more than 5,000 candidates are joining each week across accounting, banking, consulting, law, technology and healthcare alongside skilled tradespeople, including electricians and plumbers.  

Ethos was founded by CTO Daniel Mankowitz, who spent six years at Google DeepMind, and James Lo, a former McKinsey and SoftBank Vision Fund executive, who is now the CEO of Ethos.  

The funding will be used to develop Ethos’s AI agent and expand its global network, while scaling partnerships with AI labs and enterprise clients, it said.

Lo said: “A CV is a poor proxy for what someone is truly capable of. Ethos helps people to see the full shape of their expertise and where it fits in an AI-transformed economy – acting as their agent, opening doors they didn’t know existed, and giving companies a far more precise way to find the people they actually need.   

“AI is reshaping the labour market faster than our tools for valuing human expertise can keep up. Ethos is built to change that.”