TL;DR

Expert Networks serve ~11,200 unique firms across finance, consulting, and corporates.
Corporates are driving mainstream adoption - they now account for 45% of the client base by number.
Clients face a trade-off between depth of experts and admin work coordinating Expert Networks.
Big users have multiple Expert Networks in parallel, while smaller customers have one or two.
Consulting firms lead the way in multi-sourcing, with the largest buyers engaging dozens of Expert Networks.
Clients use Inex One to aggregate 30+ expert network, and get the benefit of multi-sourcing with minimal admin work and transaction costs.

We estimate that some 11,200 firms within finance, consulting, and strategy use Expert Networks. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, growing healthily despite - or maybe thanks to - a volatile macro climate.

How did we count them all? Let’s dive in!

How we mapped the Expert Network industry

No B2B market is easy to size up - after all, it’s a classic task you’d pay strategy consultants to do for you. It’s especially true for expert network clients, as data is proprietary, closely guarded, and fragmented.

But as it turns out, the answer was hidden in plain sight. For the last eight years, Inex One has been analyzing, aggregating and improving the expert network industry. As part of that, we had to figure out which clients to help first.

Drawing on our consulting roots, we used a dual sizing approach:

Top-Down Analysis: Finding the theoretically largest possible client pool.
Bottom-Up Synthesis: Analyzing public disclosures and proprietary data from industry players, summed up - and then bridged to the top-down numbers.

Starting from the top

We start by sizing the theoretically largest market - counting all plausible expert network clients. These client segments are proven users, with the resources to use even the traditional, prepaid, Expert Networks:

Financial Services: Globally, there are some 10,000 hedge funds and 10,000+ private equity funds.
Consulting: The consulting industry is massive, and can vaguely be defined as any firm selling advice - which is in the millions when you consider micro-firms and independent consultants. For our exercise, we use the roughly 3,000 consulting firms assessed by Consulting magazine, across their various regional rankings. We assume “being assessed” by them as a proxy for having sufficient market presence and scale. For now, we disregard the fact that also some independent consultants use Expert Networks.
Corporates: We assume that all firms with 250+ employees could be expert network users, as they’d likely have dedicated teams for A) corporate strategy/M&A, or B) B2B product strategy and user research. This segment includes some 75,000 firms (250+ employees) in the EU and the US alone, so let’s round up to 100k relevant firms globally, as the services are less established in APAC.

So all in all, we have some 120k+ firms, perhaps 200k when adding segments not yet counted (banks, asset managers, smaller corporates, etc.).

This is a lot! Now, most of these firms don’t even know what an expert network is. Even in 2026, Expert Networks give an information edge to the firms who know how to use Expert Networks.

Great, so 200k is our theoretical TAM in number of clients. Now it’s time for the:

Bottom-up synthesis

While our top-down approach gave us the theoretical maximum, our bottom-up synthesis is based on actual reported numbers. Lots of data, as it turned out, is hidden in plain sight. Most expert networks disclose (or dare we say flex) the number of clients they serve. Like any good consultants, we counted all the available data and made informed guesstimates to fill the gaps.

Many Expert Networks publicly detail the size and the composition of their client base in regulatory filings, marketing materials, press releases, or on their websites. For example:

GLG disclosed that it works with more than 3,000 clients, including nearly half of Fortune 100 companies, 1,000+ PE funds, 700+ social impact orgs, 500+ public equity funds, etc., in its S-1 filing and factsheets.
Guidepoint reports that it works with more than 3,870 clients, including 1,500+ corporates, 1,000+ PE-VC firms, 500+ hedge funds, 750+ consulting firms, 120+ leading banks, etc. The reported number likely includes ‘all contracts ever held’ and the regular clients could be lower.
AlphaSense states that it has over 6,000 clients. AlphaSense is not a pure-play expert network, so we’ll adjust this number downwards a bit to match the share of clients we think are actually using their EN services.
VisasQ, which acquired US-based Coleman, reports that it serves 1,821 clients globally, including 500+ corporations, 250+ consulting and finance, and 100+ “overseas clients”.
AlphaSights reports that it works with over 900 firms, including 250+ PE funds, 450+ hedge funds, 100+ asset managers, 20% of the Fortune 500 companies, and the top global consulting firms.
Third Bridge says that it works with over 950 investment firms.
Capvision discloses that it serves more than 2,000 clients globally, including 700+ financial institutions, 200+ consulting firms, and 300+ other corporations.
Inex One serves about 600 clients as of early 2026. This is concentrated to consulting, private equity firms and corporates, but also includes banks, hedge funds, asset mgrs, and market research firms.
Dialectica reports doesn’t share the number of client organizations, only the number of “client users” - but we can work with that.
Atheneum reported that it serves more than 500 large organizations in fundraising documents.
proSapient says that it serves over 100 clients across Europe and the USA.

There are more than 120 active Expert Networks, but we estimate that these 11 networks contribute roughly to 88% of the market in terms of revenue.

In total, compiling data from these 10 major networks, plus Inex One’s own figures, gives a preliminary total of ~16,900 client-expert network contracts (88% of the market). If we extrapolate this to 100% of the market, it gets us to ~19,150 client contracts in total.

Great - now let’s break it back down to our customer segments.

Expert Networks use different names for their customers. So we’ve harmonized all names to the granular segmentation data that GLG used in their 2021 IPO filing. Where Expert Networks haven’t detailed the segment split, we assume it’s the same as GLG’s, which at the time was the dominant expert network. If we then placed all client-expert network contracts in a big pile, it would look like this:

Factoring the multi-source adjustment

The aggregate client pool of ~19,150 is a lot; but let’s keep in mind it’s the sum of all contracts; not the number of individual firms using Expert Networks.

Most firms using Expert Networks contract with more than one vendor, to cast a wide net and avoid being stuck with unfavorable terms. To account for this, we adjust the number of client contracts across segments:

Consulting firms: Use multiple networks to support international operations and/or the need for speed to insight.
Investment firms (PE/HF/Asset mgmt.): Use multiple networks to cast a wide net of insights, yet they typically use fewer networks than consultants do.
Corporates: Less likely multi-source, as their needs are more often infrequent and lower-velocity.

We see that even within high-velocity sectors like consulting, PE or hedge funds, the multi-sourcing behaviour isn’t uniform. A firm’s degree of multi-sourcing correlates pretty well with the volume of calls they make, and the urgency of the projects in which they make those calls.

The most prolific firms in each sector use lots of Expert Networks. Conversely, there’s a long tail of thousands of mid and small-size firms who use just a few networks, in a power law-like distribution.

The vast majority of clients are not super users. They maintain a lean setup with just 1 or 2 core vendors. Here’s our estimate of the average number of parallel contracts held by the top 100 spenders and the weighted average across sectors.

Consultants use more Expert Networks than anyone else, as their projects tend to be fast, and intense, and range across sectors (as opposed to e.g. sector-focused investment firms). But beyond the largest spenders, there are thousands of smaller-spenders (research firms, independent consultants etc.) pulling the statistical average down, even though the bulk of the industry spending happens at the top.

There’s a similar pattern across all segments, with the ‘Top 100’ firms being far more prolific in their multi-sourcing than their peers.

When you use Inex One, you get access to more than 30 vendors in one platform, under one contract. For this exercise, we’ve thus counted that as one single contract.

Accessing multiple Expert Networks in one place gives you all the benefits of multi-sourcing (fast access to niche experts and competitive pricing), with minimal admin. Now any firm can run research as effectively as the MBB consultants, without the admin overhead.

Adjusting for multi-sourcing, we get to a unique client count of 11,200. Consulting and finance firms make up ~55% of the market while corporates contribute to the rest ~45%.

Expert Networks - simplified

The long and winding history of Expert Networks continues - growing from secretive hedge funds into a core tool for any business seeking insights. As the market grows more complex, so does the need for users to simplify it.

Inex One de-risk your expert research by aggregating more than 30 Expert Networks and survey firms in one platform. You can work smarter, not harder - and focus on the insights.

See what 8,000+ users say, or just get expert insights here.

Appendix

We first ran this analysis & article in early 2022. Since then, the expert network industry has grown, and many Expert Networks have bumped their public client count (some rather soon after that article was published). Here’s what has changed since that initial estimate.

Who uses Expert Networks: what changed in our estimates

The estimated number of firms using Expert Networks grew by 150%
Our estimate of the unique client base has grown from 4,500 in 2022 to 11,200 in 2026. This is mainly due to the market growing overall, a wider data capture, and Expert Networks disclosing higher client numbers.
- Data Set Expansion: Accounts for 20% increase
  More of the major Expert Networks (e.g, Dialectica, Atheneum, AlphaSense) have begun to disclose data on their client base, allowing us to capture more granular data.
- Market Growth: Accounts for 60% increase
  Other large networks (e.g., GLG, Guidepoint, Capvision, VisasQ) have grown their reported client base, indicating a phenomenal market expansion. 35% of this is due to Guidepoint radically increasing their reported number of clients (from 1,000 to 5,000).
- Residual Market Share: Accounts for 20% increase. Our new methodology now also accounts for the cumulative client base of the 100+ smaller, specialized Expert Networks, holding ~12% of the market share.
The client mix has changed
The reported client mix has evolved, with a bias towards strategy consulting and finance firms. This was a surprise to us, running counter to the overarching narrative in the expert network space of Corporates being the next growth area:
- Corporate User Base: Increased by ~110%
  Corporates are adopting Expert Networks mainly in corporate strategy and M&A teams, and for product innovation and user research.
- Strategy Consulting & Finance User Base: Increased by ~200%. We believe this segment’s jump is largely due to our expanded inclusion of networks serving regional, niche, and specialized consulting firms, and including market research firms in the mix.
Clients use more Expert Networks in parallel
A decade ago, many clients were fine with just prepaying for GLG. That has changed, with the majority of expert network users now engaging more than one network. This gives them a wider selection and more competitive pricing. Many opt for Inex One, to effectively get 30+ vendors in one platform.
Consequently, we updated the multi-sourcing factors, which means the sum of individual expert network-client contracts represent fewer individual clients using Expert Networks.
In the past year alone, Inex One has helped more than 150 new clients start using Expert Networks efficiently, with great user reviews. That brings the count to more than 5% of the total market - and growing.
Want superior access to Expert Networks? Get started here.
With widened adoption, the avg. spend per client has decreased.
The market has grown in value, but that growth is outpaced by the growth in unique new client firms.
- Overall market value: Grew by ~25%
  Our expert network market sizing shows the industry has grown by a healthy 12% CAGR over these years.
- Average spend/client firm: Decreased across all segments. Many new clients have found the industry, typically starting small and bringing down the average spend/account.

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Notes and limitations:

This analysis relies on combining publicly available data with proprietary market intelligence. For full transparency, here are the key assumptions and limitations used in our client mapping model:

We applied GLG’s client split, because it is the largest expert network and the client split was readily available. However, AlphaSights has fewer corporates and consulting clients than GLG, making hedge funds and asset managers a much larger share of their total clients). Using their split would have made our estimate of the two latter segments larger, and the $-spend-per-firm smaller.
The adjustment for “multi-sourcing” is a critical assumption, based on what we’ve learned from conversations with hundreds of clients. We are fairly confident about the adjustments used: after all, our expertise is expert interviews ;)
The average client segment spend split is calculated using Inex One's proprietary internal data. It is important to note that average spend figures can fluctuate slightly based on the specific expert network model.

Expert Network Client Mapping: How we sized the market