Third Bridge
Third Bridge is one of the largest expert networks globally. Founded in 2007 as Cognolink, it rebranded in 2015 as Third Bridge (the name of one of its business units). It was one of the first firms to successfully reduce GLG's market dominance, growing in tandem with AlphaSights. Its founders had a background in consulting with Bain & Company, which was an important early client according to expert sources.
About Third Bridge
Third Bridge is one of the largest expert networks globally. Founded in 2007 as Cognolink, it rebranded in 2015 as Third Bridge (the name of one of its business units). It was one of the first firms to successfully reduce GLG’s market dominance, growing in tandem with AlphaSights. Its founders had a background in consulting with Bain & Company, which was an important early client according to expert sources.
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The history of Third Bridge
When Third Bridge started out, GLG was dependent on its traditional static network. Experts were recruited proactively, at fairs and from telephone directories. Onboarding an expert was time-consuming and complex. Third Bridge, lacking a database of experts, began recruiting experts directly for live projects. To enable this, they sped up the onboarding of experts with modern tech tools and user-friendly interfaces. This business model’s success was supported by the even faster growth of LinkedIn.
Third Bridge business areas
The company combines a large database with custom recruiting, promoted in two business areas:
Expert calls (formerly branded as Connections), a standard expert network operation with phone calls, surveys, project recruiting, etc. This is the core service offered by Third Bridge, with approximately half of the firm’s staff working in the Connections research team.
Library (formerly branded as Forum), a three-part product, which includes company databases, a transcript library (including hosted expert calls, which were the core feature of Forum previously), and the ability to AI search all this content.
Their product, Library (formerly Forum), has seen rapid growth since it was created in 2015. As of June 2020, approximately 10% of Third Bridge’s employees were working on generating content for the Forum, conducting and transcribing 5000+ expert interviews per year. Clients pay per-seat subscriptions to access Third Bridge’s growing database of call transcripts, which by 2026 covered more than 65,000 companies. Our expert sources mention that it represents ~25% of Third Bridge’s revenues, and the lion’s share of its net profit. In October 2022, Third Bridge started hiring for roles to produce user-generated content. Just like Tegus, Third Bridge will transcribe expert calls done by its users, and post them to its library for others to read. To date, all transcripts have been produced by full-time Third Bridge employees interviewing experts.
Third Bridge historic milestones
2007 - Founded in London as Cognolink.
2010 - Acquired the Swedish expert network Epito.
2012 - Raised approximately $4.5 million from growth capital firm Beringea, for a 13% stake (based on corporate filings). That implies a valuation of $35m post-money, representing approx. 2.6x the revenues in that year.
2015 - Rebranded from Cognolink to Third Bridge.
2017 - the Swedish private equity firm IK Investment Partners acquired Beringea’s stake and substantially more, according to our expert interview sources.
2019 - Inex One identified Third Bridge as a global leader in our review of the 2019 expert network market size.
2021 - French private equity firm Astorg bought IK Investment Partners' stake and invested in Third Bridge alongside its founders. The investment was later said to be more than $200m.
2022 - At the end of the year, Third Bridge lost three senior leaders: the President, the CFO, and the Chief People Officer.
2022 - Third Bridge opened a third US office in Dallas, Texas, and began moving operations out of NYC. As of February 2024, Dallas hosts about 25% of Third Bridge's US employees, with ~10% in Los Angeles and the remaining 65% still in NYC.
April 2025 - Opened a new Dubai office as part of a global growth strategy.
July 2025 - Unveiled a new visual identity and website.
March 2026 - Launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP), a platform-agnostic intelligence layer exposing 100,000+ expert transcripts to LLMs and financial AI platforms, extending Third Bridge's content-distribution strategy (see Partnerships below) directly into AI tooling.
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Excerpt from a Third Bridge press release on 31 Jan 2022.
By June 2020, Third Bridge had 1000+ employees working across eight offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Dubai and Mumbai - headcount has since grown substantially further, to roughly 2,600 by March 2026, with its workforce today concentrated most in East Asia (~36%), North America (~21%) and Northern Europe (~21%). Third Bridge reported revenue of £215 million for the financial year ending in December 2023.
It remains one of the largest expert network companies by employee count, second only to GLG. Third Bridge featured in the Sunday Times 2019 BDO Profit Track 100 as one of Britain’s top 100 private companies with the fastest-growing profits.
Third Bridge cubs
Over the years, some Third Bridge colleagues have left to set up their own expert networks:
2017 - Six Degrees Intelligence was launched in Hangzhou, China, focused on experts in China.
2020 - Nexus Network, based in London, launched.
2021 - NetworksX started in Melbourne, Australia.
2024 - The Continental Exchange, a boutique network launched in Texas by a former Third Bridge manager.
Third Bridge partnerships
As many expert networks venture into content, there are two approaches: wide distribution and a walled garden. Third Bridge Library (formerly known as Forum) started as a "walled garden": clients needed a subscription to access the content.
Third Bridge eventually pivoted and optimized for distribution. Today, Third Bridge publishes its content both on Forum and on several "distribution partners", starting with Bloomberg (year unknown).
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From 2025, they expanded distribution to multiple other 3rd-party platforms:
June 2025 - Joined a consortium investing in Aiera, where Third Bridge's content will be presented alongside others.
July 2025 - Publishing its content on Portrait Analytics and Hebbia.
Sep 2025 - Added content distribution on Model ML.
Winter 2025-2026 - Added distribution on Anthropic, Finster AI, Samaya AI, and Rogo.
This stands in contrast to the "walled garden" strategy of some networks, such as AlphaSights, Guidepoint, and In Practise, which publish their content exclusively on their proprietary platforms and don't distribute it to 3rd parties. See our deep dive on expert transcript library strategies here.
FAQ
What does Third Bridge specialize in? Third Bridge specializes in expert calls and a large, actively growing transcript library (Library, formerly Forum), distributed both on its own platform and through multiple third-party partners.
Is Third Bridge available on Inex One? No - Third Bridge is not part of the Inex One marketplace.
Looking for expert network options? Explore active partners on the Inex One marketplace.
