When people have career or job questions, they usually tap into their network to find experts who’ve faced a similar predicament and can offer answers. Increasingly, that job is falling to AI.
SuperMe is a network of AI profiles built from the knowledge of real-life experts. When you ask a question, the platform determines which experts are best suited to answer and creates a group chat with their AI profiles.
To scale that network on both sides, meaning more users asking questions and more experts supplying knowledge, the startup announced today that it is raising $20 million in funding led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner, with participation from Greylock Partners.
Casey Winters and Ludo Antonov founded the startup in 2024. Both have experience at large consumer companies. Winters held exec roles at Grubhub, Pinterest, and Eventbrite and has advised companies like Airbnb and Canva part-time. Antonov was head of engineering at multiple startups, including Pinterest, Lyft, and Whatnot.
The two got connected when Winters was advising Whatnot. ChatGPT was becoming popular around the same time, and they decided to build a network business using AI.
“There are these hidden networks in Silicon Valley of who the best people are for niche skills. Our idea was: Could we make that network of who the absolute best people are more transparent, and could we take all of the key insights that are locked inside their heads and make them more readily available?” Winters told TechCrunch over a call.
Users can go to the SuperMe website and type their question into the chatbot to start a group of experts. They can also return to a group they have formed or joined and ask follow-up questions.
You can ask a question like “Analyze my pitch deck. Which parts of the story are the weakest,
and which questions should I be most prepared to answer?” and get answers from AI profiles of longtime VCs like Mercedes Bent, Sarah Tavel, and Josh Elman. Users can also go to these people’s profiles and ask questions directly rather than in a group chat.
To collect knowledge from users, SuperMe scans public sources such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, and blogs. It also draws on connected apps such as Google Drive, Notion, Gmail, and meeting notetaking tools like Granola. SuperMe said some of this data will include personal information and trade secrets, but it makes sure that none of it appears in answers.
The network is currently free, but the startup plans to cap the number of questions users can ask, after which they will have to cough up some money. It is also considering how to give experts incentives to add more knowledge.
SuperMe also works with MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets AI chatbots connect to outside tools and data), so users can ask questions from within chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT.
The startup has about 13 employees. It is hiring on the tech side to improve its AI models for conversation and for matching questions to experts, and on the network side for someone to find experts in subject areas the platform doesn’t yet cover.
Forerunner’s Green said that SuperMe is well positioned to build a platform where AI collaborates with humans.
“I think it’s one of the reasons why this is very timely, and it’s good to have something like this establishing itself when we’re relatively early in this journey,” she told TechCrunch over a call. “Because there’s going to be so many lessons that are going to be learned, and they need to be shared so that people can come along in a productive way. I think that the balance here is to build a network so that you do have a true sharing component where there are incentives and benefits for everybody to contribute what they know.”
Source: techcrunch.com
