SuperMe is a startup that builds AI profiles from the knowledge of real-life experts. It announced it is raising $20 million led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green, with Greylock Partners participating. Users ask a question in its chatbot, and the platform forms a group chat with the best-suited experts' AI profiles.
When people have career or job questions, they usually turn to their network for someone who has already faced the same problem. Increasingly, that role is going to AI. SuperMe, a startup that builds AI profiles from the knowledge of real-life experts, announced that it is raising $20 million in funding led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner, with participation from Greylock Partners. The money will help the company grow on both ends of its marketplace, adding users who ask questions and experts who supply the knowledge behind the answers.
How does SuperMe's expert network work?
The platform works like this. A user types a question into the SuperMe chatbot, and the system determines which experts are best suited to answer it. It then creates a group chat with those experts’ AI profiles. Users can return to a group they formed or joined and ask follow-up questions, or they can skip the group and message a single expert directly.
Who founded SuperMe and where did they work?
Casey Winters and Ludo Antonov founded the company in 2024. Both come from large consumer companies. Winters held executive roles at Grubhub, Pinterest and Eventbrite, and he has advised companies including Airbnb and Canva on a part-time basis. Antonov was head of engineering at several startups, including Pinterest, Lyft and Whatnot.
The two first connected when Winters was advising Whatnot. ChatGPT was gaining popularity around that time, and the pair decided to build a network business around AI.
“There are these hidden networks in Silicon Valley of who the best people are for niche skills,” Winters told TechCrunch over a call. “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?”
The company offers a sample of how it might work. A user could ask the platform to analyze a pitch deck and identify the weakest parts of the story, along with the questions they should be ready to answer. The platform can then pull answers from AI profiles of longtime venture capitalists, including Mercedes Bent, Sarah Tavel and Josh Elman.
How does SuperMe build its expert AI profiles?
To build those profiles, SuperMe scans public sources such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack and blogs. It also draws on connected apps, including Google Drive, Notion, Gmail and meeting note-taking tools like Granola. The company acknowledges that some of this data includes personal information and trade secrets. It says it makes sure none of that material shows up in answers.
The network is free at the moment. SuperMe plans to cap the number of questions a user can ask, after which people will have to pay. The company is also weighing how to give experts incentives to add more knowledge.
SuperMe also works with the Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets AI chatbots connect to outside tools and data. That means users can ask their questions from inside chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT.
The startup has about 13 employees. It is hiring engineers to improve its AI models for conversation and for matching questions with experts. It also wants someone on the network side to recruit experts in subject areas the platform does not yet cover.
Green said SuperMe is well placed to build a platform where AI and humans work together. “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.”
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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