Can AI Fix Professional Networking? | Inside Cosign

Cosign is built around the idea that a trusted person’s willingness to vouch for someone can open professional doors that cold applications often do not. One speaker described how Brent noticed their work at Polymarket and gave them a chance at MTS, creating a path into tech. The team hopes Cosign can make similar opportunities easier to find by helping people encounter others who are willing to back them.

Drew Gupta described a larger ambition: making Cosign a source of truth for the startup ecosystem, able to answer questions about people and companies. The platform’s relationship graph is meant to ground those answers in trusted connections, rather than relying only on what a language model can learn from public information. Cosign also aims to increase users’ “surface area for luck” through profiles, graph browsing, lists, endorsements, and questions to its agent.

The intended outcome is a “coincidence of intent”: bringing people with shared ambitions and complementary skills into each other’s orbit, including potential collaborators who might otherwise never meet. Cosign’s product features are different ways to surface those people and make their work and connections easier to discover. The company is still early, however, and the usefulness of the idea depends on people and organizations contributing enough information to make the network meaningful.

The Cosign Awards are intended to recognize impactful operators who can receive less attention than founders and CEOs, alongside notable companies and products. People can nominate and vote for colleagues, with categories spanning roles and company awards such as talent density. Organizers said they could not make the categories as granular as they wanted. At the time of the discussion, Rising Stars had 135 nominees, Public Intellectuals had 65, and Podcast of the Year had 76. The team also hopes employees will vote for their own companies, treating participation as a possible signal that people like working there.

A speaker estimated that Cosign had roughly 40,000 to 50,000 profiles and about 400 users had created company lists. The lists provide lightweight curation; one example was Peggy’s list of 36 companies featured by Not Boring. Cosign’s “you talk” is a personal endorsement: a user can signal that they would work with someone or consider that person promising. These tools add individual judgment to the wider graph, rather than presenting professional discovery as a search for credentials alone.

Cosign offers an in-product agent, an iMessage agent, and a personal MCP that can connect other agents to the platform. The team is prioritizing its agents page, where users can connect an MCP, text the agent, or use a conversational agent in the interface, and plans more integrations. Its aim is to become an agent-native professional networking platform. A speaker argued that LinkedIn will not provide an MCP with broad access to its graph, limiting people’s ability to search for the connections they need.

The team envisions agents comparing a candidate’s goals and qualifications with a company’s needs, then making an introduction to a hiring manager when there is mutual fit. Agents could also compare people’s and companies’ goals and make other introductions, potentially reducing reliance on job boards and cold outreach. One speaker noted that current agents can identify opportunities but lack a direct way to connect users with the people behind them. Cosign remains in early development, with rough edges and a roadmap that changes quickly in response to feedback; the team plans to smooth onboarding but cannot specify the product months in advance. Awards nominations were open through the end of November, and winners selected with judges would be invited to build relationships with one another.