All about Ethnio

Ethnio is based in Pasadena, California, and was created to solve the most complex research operations puzzles in the world. Founded as part of the UX research agency, Bolt | Peters, it’s the only participant management platform built by researchers.

Built by UXRs

Ethnio was created inside a UX research agency, and real global research still drives what we build.

Participants matter

Research runs on participants. We obsess over the participant experience so your studies run smoothly.

Fast by default

Launch a study in the morning, talk to qualified participants that afternoon. Speed is the whole point.

34B

Ethnio study views

7.5M

Completed participants

$25.3M

Incentives issued

191

Countries served

10+

Years in research operations

Mission

Support Re Ops, Research, Design, and Insights with the best tools

Our journey

2007

The beginning

Our founder, Nate Bolt, was running Bolt | Peters, a UX Research agency in San Francisco and started to build Ethnio as a simple screening intercept to help the agency conduct live recruiting of participants directly from client’s websites. It then started to grow into software for screen-sharing and recording.

2010

The book

Mostly written by co-author Tony Tulathimutte, Nate helped write the Rosenfeld book, Remote Research. It was an early guide for UX researchers who wanted to start conducting interviews remotely, instead of in-person.

2012

Meta acquires Bolt | Peters, Ethnio on hold

After 10 years, Bolt | Peters was absorbed by Meta, and Ethnio was a side project while Nate worked as a research manager at both Instagram and Meta. He built a sideways room that is still part of Instagram today.

2016

Full-time dedicated company

After Nate left Meta, he was able to finally make Ethnio his full-time focus, and started hiring the first dedicated team to build Ethnio in LA.

2017

Pool

In collaboration with AirBnB, Ethnio built the first CRM and panel management tool specifically for UX Researchers. We called it Pool as in pool of participants, but also because panel sounds less fun and we could buy this really awesome Pool cake for the team at AirBnB:

2020

Remote research goes mainstream

Research teams everywhere made remote moderated sessions the default. Ethnio grew with them, expanding from recruiting into full participant management for global teams.

Today

The ReOps + AI era

We’re al being asked to move faster with fewer people, and AI is changing what research software looks like. We're building for that reality: automation where it saves ReOps teams hours, human judgment where it counts, and the best participant CRM for research anywhere in the world.