expert-network
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The Consultants Who Win by Making Themselves Unnecessary
Chameleon Collective sells senior operators without the usual pyramid of junior consultants. Its cleverest promise is also its exit plan: lead the change, do the work, recruit the team - then leave.
NewtonX
NewtonX is a New York-based B2B market research and intelligence company that connects businesses to hard-to-reach, identity-verified experts. Instead of relying on a fixed panel, its AI-driven Graph scans more than 1.1 billion professionals across 140+ industries to custom-recruit the exact decision-makers a research brief requires, then runs surveys, interviews, and AI-moderated studies on top. Founded in 2016 by former McKinsey consultants Sascha Eder and Germain Chastel with Anuja Ketan, NewtonX serves Fortune 500 companies, top management consultancies, and financial institutions that need trustworthy, fraud-resistant data to make high-stakes decisions.
GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group)
GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group) is the world's largest expert network, connecting professionals - investors, corporations, consultancies and non-profits - with a marketplace of roughly one million vetted subject-matter experts. Through one-on-one phone consultations, surveys, roundtables, site visits and custom research, GLG turns a client's questions into direct conversations with people who have first-hand knowledge, wrapped in a compliance framework designed for regulated industries. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in New York, the firm operates in more than 20 cities worldwide and generates roughly $600 million in annual revenue.
Maven Research
Maven Research runs a microconsulting platform - an expert network that connects decision-makers with vetted industry professionals for on-demand phone consultations, expert interviews, surveys and B2B research panels. Founded in 2008 by Wyatt Nordstrom and Mark Platosh, Maven uses machine-learning-assisted matching plus human curation to source specialists for market research, investment due diligence and product decisions, pitching answers that arrive faster and cheaper than traditional consulting. The company also licenses OpenITM, a white-label internal talent marketplace that lets large organizations build private expert communities.
Sascha Eder
Sascha Eder is CEO and co-founder of NewtonX, a New York-based B2B market research platform that uses an AI-driven Knowledge Graph to custom-recruit specialists from a pool of more than a billion professionals. A German-born former national track and field athlete, he trained at MIT and HEC Paris, consulted at McKinsey and BCG, and started NewtonX in 2017 with fellow McKinsey alum Germain Chastel after growing frustrated with the panels and speed of legacy research.
Handshake
Handshake is a San Francisco company that began as the career network for Gen Z, connecting tens of millions of students and recent grads with employers and university career centers. Built by three Michigan Tech computer science students to give kids from non-elite schools a fair shot at good jobs, it grew into the dominant early-career recruiting platform. In January 2025 it launched Handshake AI, turning its network of students, PhDs and domain experts into a human data-labeling marketplace that supplies high-quality training data to frontier AI labs - a pivot that has grown into a roughly $1B annualized gross revenue business.
Wiedza i Praktyka (WIP)
Wiedza i Praktyka (WIP) is one of Poland's largest providers of specialist professional information. Founded in Warsaw in 1997, it equips accountants, HR and payroll specialists, occupational-safety officers, healthcare managers, educators, lawyers and public administrators with the practical, up-to-date guidance they need to apply constantly changing regulations. WIP blends print and e-letters, industry web portals, software tools, expert helplines, and the Educado online learning platform, plus open and in-house training through Akademia Wiedza i Praktyka. Since August 2025 it has been wholly owned by Germany's VNR Group.
Yang Zhao
Yang Zhao is the Chief Business Officer of Handshake AI, where he runs business and operations for a fast-scaling human-data business serving frontier AI labs. He spent four years at Scale AI as Head of Product Deployment and Operations before joining Handshake, and earlier led growth and strategy at the consumer-rentals company Zumper. He pitches Handshake's edge not as tooling but as raw access to the largest expert network in the US.
AfterQuery
AfterQuery is a San Francisco applied research lab that builds expert-generated datasets, benchmarks, and reinforcement-learning environments for the world's leading AI labs. The company recruits nearly 100,000 vetted domain experts - in finance, law, medicine, software, and beyond - to teach frontier models how specialists actually think.
Labelbox
Labelbox is a San Francisco-based AI data factory that helps frontier AI labs and enterprises generate, label, and evaluate the high-quality training data their models need. Its platform combines annotation tools, model-assisted automation, and a global expert network (Alignerr) to power post-training, RLHF, and multimodal reasoning workloads.
Dirk Morbitzer
Dirk Morbitzer is a senior executive and consultant with 25+ years of experience in renewable energy, solar, and cleantech. He is CEO of DIMOCO Inc., a boutique consulting firm specializing in solar and energy storage, and is a top 1% expert in the Energy Group at GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group). Previously CEO North America and Group CEO of AEROCOMPACT Group Holding AG, and before that Director of Strategic Sourcing at Sunrun for eight years, Morbitzer brings deep expertise in strategic sourcing, international supply chain management, M&A, and PE investment navigation across Europe, Asia, and North America.