Earn From Your Expertise Without the Self-Promotion Circus

01 /The Concept

Ethos starts from a simple premise: your professional expertise has value outside your day job. The platform gives working professionals a way to earn additional income by selling that expertise to outside clients.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Paid consulting engagements – staffed by consulting firms or companies seeking expertise on specific topics.

Market research participation – sharing informed perspectives on industry players and emerging trends.

One-on-one expert calls – 30 to 60 minute conversations where a company gets a specialist's take on a specific question.

For example, a company might use Ethos to find someone to advise on pricing strategy by searching "Who from Shopify can I talk to about enterprise pricing?"

Or a technical hire might be surfaced by searching for "a senior machine learning engineer who built recommendation systems at Netflix or Shopify."

Investment analysts can source market intelligence before building a thesis – specifying the industry context or company situation the expert should know deeply.

From the buyer's side, the task is simply to describe the problem and the profile of the person who can solve it. Questions can be quite precise – "find a payments expert who can explain how Stripe defends against competition" – and the platform's AI delivers an immediate shortlist with relevant experience summaries.

Building that shortlist requires far more than scraping LinkedIn profiles. Ethos's AI aggregates information from a wide range of public sources – articles, podcasts, conference talks, and other content the expert has produced.

Beyond that, the AI actually calls new experts joining the marketplace for a structured interview, drawing out knowledge about their experience and focus areas that wouldn't surface from text-based sources alone.

Ethos [covered previously](/review/jeksperty-ot-kotoryh-ne-toshnit) raised €3 million last spring. Since then, growth has accelerated sharply.

According to the founder, 35,000 new experts join the platform every week – and some of them are earning an additional $10,000 per month. On the strength of that trajectory, Ethos just raised $22.75 million led by a16z.

02 /Why It Matters

Ethos sits at the intersection of two emerging patterns in the market.

One is the push to build rich expert profiles from public sources – articles, podcasts, conference talks – combined with voice AI agents that conduct structured interviews to surface depth that text alone can't capture.

Verata ([related review](/review/v-20-raz-bolshe-v-razy-interesnee)), a YC graduate, built this for private equity firms searching for executive talent for portfolio companies. The platform's edge: it maps individual candidates' histories against the financial outcomes of the companies they worked at, creating probabilistic scores for how much each person actually drove those results.

HelloSky ([related review](/review/vot-kak-teper-budut-iskat-pravilnyh-sotrudnikov)), which raised $8 million, built a similar platform for sourcing executives across any industry.

For "ordinary" professionals with thinner public footprints, voice AI agents take over – surfacing depth through structured conversation rather than document analysis. Jack & Jill ([related review](/review/sdelaj-idealnyj-marketplejs-v-kotorom-ne-nuzhno-iskat)) raised $20 million on that approach last fall.

Laborup ([related review](/review/starye-rabotnye-sajty-pora-vykidyvat-na-pomojku-istorii)) applied the same technology to blue-collar labor markets and raised $5.8 million last summer.

Running alongside that is a wave of AI-powered platforms helping individual professionals and micro-businesses earn more. These are showing up across wildly different verticals.

Manifest OS ([related review](/review/tehnologiya-plus-biznes-model)) surfaced in late April with $60 million – an AI platform that helps solo attorneys and small law firms find clients and deliver services more efficiently.

Casa ([related review](/review/zarabatyvat-chuzhimi-rukami)) appeared around the same time with $27 million – a subscription-based home repair and maintenance service where the startup matches homeowners with skilled tradespeople.

Both Casa and Manifest OS function as client-acquisition channels for independent professionals – a plumber gets jobs, a lawyer gets cases, without having to market themselves.

Ethos takes the same concept to its logical extreme: the experts it serves already have jobs. Ethos is pure incremental income for people who have no interest in self-promotion.

One difference worth noting: Casa and Manifest OS serve solo operators and micro-businesses who struggle to find clients at all. Ethos targets professionals who work for established organizations and simply want to monetize their expertise on the side – without driving for strangers on weekends or posting thought leadership content they don't have time to write.

What makes a platform like Ethos possible now, of course, is AI. Without a system that can gather rich information about individuals and answer nuanced queries about their capabilities, this kind of marketplace couldn't operate at scale.

03 /Opportunities

There's something elegantly symmetrical here. Collecting detailed information about people and giving them a way to earn from that information are two sides of the same coin.

It's the only way to surface hidden talent – people who can genuinely help you or your company, across every kind of task from fixing something at home to shaping a strategic decision.

And it's more reliable than hunting for experts on social media, where visibility rewards those who know how to generate noise – not necessarily those with the deepest knowledge. The most experienced people rarely have time or appetite for personal branding.

The opportunity is to build platforms like this in specific niches and geographies. So that the people who need specialized help can find it – and the people with specialized knowledge can get paid for it, without having to become their own marketing department.

Which niche would you build this in first? Because someone else is already thinking about it.