Building the Infrastructure for Intelligent Work.

The problem was obvious. The solution wasn't.

Enterprise hiring was broken in a specific, frustrating way. Staffing agencies charged 40–60% markups on every placement. Companies paid enormous fees for talent they could barely vet. Professionals kept a fraction of what clients actually paid for their work. And the agency in the middle contributed almost nothing to justify the cut.

Adam Jackson co-founded Braintrust in 2018 with a straightforward thesis: build a talent marketplace that eliminates the middleman entirely. No agency markups. No opaque fee structures. Talent earns more. Companies spend less. Hiring gets better.

The marketplace was built around rigorous, skills-based vetting — not resume parsing — creating a network of professionals who had earned their place through demonstrated competency, not credential signaling.

A hiring wave, a remote revolution, and a network that was ready.

When the world shifted to remote work in early 2020, Braintrust was already positioned for it. The marketplace launched out of beta into an environment where enterprise demand for contract IT and software talent was accelerating rapidly, and where the traditional agency model — built on in-person relationships and geographic proximity — showed its limits.

The platform connected thousands of laid-off technology professionals with contract opportunities at Fortune 2000 companies. Growth during this period validated the core model: enterprise buyers wanted quality talent, fast, without the agency overhead. Professionals wanted to work directly with the companies paying for their expertise.

The vetting infrastructure built during this period — skills assessment tools, structured evaluation frameworks, quality benchmark systems — became a foundational asset. It would later become the basis for what is now Braintrust AIR.

Human infrastructure for the AI era.

As AI research and development accelerated in 2022 and 2023, frontier labs needed something that couldn't be sourced from a server rack: high-quality human judgment at scale. Training data annotation, model evaluation, preference ranking, and domain-expert review require people — diverse, skilled, reliable people working across thousands of disciplines.

Braintrust expanded into AI training infrastructure, connecting network members — across healthcare, engineering, STEM, legal, and the humanities — with leading AI labs and infrastructure companies. Thousands of contributors now work monthly on AI training projects, conducting model evaluation, generating specialized datasets, and providing expert review across highly technical domains.

AI training is now one of the fastest-growing segments of the Braintrust network — and our position as a trusted intermediary between frontier AI development and high-quality human expertise has become a meaningful competitive differentiator.

The assessment tools we built for ourselves became a standalone product.

Over six years of running a marketplace, Braintrust developed assessment infrastructure that enterprise customers kept asking about independently. The AI-driven screening tools we used to vet our own network were outperforming the standalone products our customers were paying external vendors to provide.

In 2024, we launched Braintrust AIR as a standalone enterprise product — AI interview software that conducts real, adaptive voice interviews with candidates, evaluates responses semantically, and delivers structured scorecards directly into ATS systems like Workday, iCIMS, Greenhouse, and SmartRecruiters.

AIR automates the highest-volume, most time-intensive part of enterprise recruiting — the initial screening conversation — at infinite scale, with zero scheduling overhead, and with a consistency and objectivity that human phone screens cannot replicate. It passed an independent third-party bias audit with zero adverse findings across all demographic groups.

Workflow automation for the entire enterprise.

The same AI infrastructure logic that powers AIR — connecting systems, transforming data, automating structured decisions — applies to far more than recruiting. Enterprises run on dozens of disconnected systems. Data lives in silos. Workflows that should take seconds take weeks because they're stitched together by manual steps and outdated integrations.

Braintrust Nexus is our enterprise workflow automation platform. It lets teams build AI-native automation flows that connect front-office, middle-office, and back-office systems — without engineering resources. Nexus processes data, routes decisions, and triggers actions across 100+ enterprise integrations, designed to replace the manual coordination work that currently consumes massive organizational capacity.