At General Catalyst, we back founders who transform industries by delivering tangible value with applied AI. In this vein, we are excited to announce our seed investment in Ethos, who are reinventing expert networks with applied AI.
Why Ethos AI?
Locating people with relevant expertise is challenging. It underlies critical problems, from investors conducting due diligence, to companies hiring top talent. Despite the enormous growth in professional data, there remain few ways to evaluate expertise at scale.
Ethos proves that AI offers a step-change in assessing the credibility and relevance of expertise. AI can assess a person’s portfolio of work, even when it requires domain knowledge. It can capture experiences that do not exist on a resume, through natural conversation. It can estimate the relevance of a person on a conceptual level, not merely with filters. The result is not only a revolutionary way to locate relevant experts for any task, but also a platform for matching people to opportunities at scale.
From the moment we met Ethos’ co-founders, James and Daniel, in 2024, we knew they had a compelling combination of expertise in applied AI and industry, and an authentic social mission. James is a serial founder and operator. He honed his expertise at McKinsey and SoftBank solving complex enterprise problems at companies like Arm and WeWork. Daniel is a reinforcement learning expert and second-time founder. He has spent the last six years developing real-world AI applications at Google Deepmind, ranging from YouTube to Gemini, including as lead author of AlphaDev whose solutions are used trillions of times every day. They exude humility and ambition in equal measure.
Reimagining How We Discover and Harness Human Expertise
Ethos has automated the expert network model end-to-end. Clients can search for relevant experts across millions of profiles in seconds, including assessing uncommon datapoints like academic papers, code and patent filings. They can conduct calls on-platform and extract insights from transcripts. It is also designed to be the best platform for experts: in addition to call fees, Ethos rewards experts with royalties for citations of their knowledge. The result is a faster way to glean insights from uniquely relevant experts, all done with a significantly smaller cost base than incumbents.
Their early traction is a testimony to their usability: Ethos is already working with over 25 private equity firms, hedge funds and consultancies, and more than 17,000 experts have signed up to the platform.
We are most enthusiastic because Ethos’ expert network is the start of a wide-ranging vision. Ethos’ knowledge graph will enable them to match people to opportunities in many other contexts: from market research to hiring. Their vision aligns with our belief in AI as a democratizing force, enabling many more people to access relevant opportunities at every stage of their lives.
Accelerating Human Opportunity with Applied AI
James and Daniel’s vision to build human-centric AI is one with which we resonate deeply. In a time when many fear AI will commoditize the value of our knowledge, Ethos is leveraging AI to discover, scale and fairly reward human expertise. We share their fervent belief that AI will not only enhance what humans can do, but accelerate what we do together at a global scale.
When we began exploring this partnership together, we did something unusual: we spoke about our shared passion for philosophy and the arts, and our shared vision to start another European Renaissance at the intersection of technology and the humanities. We ended one of our meetings with a quote by Nietzsche: “You must still have chaos in you to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” James and Daniel have embraced the chaos to give birth to a rising star, and we look forward to seeing it grow ever brighter.
