Ex-McKinsey team bringing AI into consulting with Ascentra Labs
Private equity-backed Ascentra Labs is looking to disrupt the consulting market, using experience at top firms in a bid to “build an autonomous consulting workforce”. Led by a former McKinsey & Consulting partner, the company alleges that its services have been adopted by three of the world’s top five consulting firms.
Earlier in 2025, McKinsey & Company was gifted a commemorative trophy by OpenAI, for using 100 billion tokens with the company’s software. One of the highest usage levels of any consulting firm, the news led to some derision, both of the “commemorative Oreo” handed out by OpenAI, but also of the strategy giant’s service, which some critics argues could now be “cut out” as a “middle-man”.
But as the year draws to a close, others in the industry are doubling down on AI being the future of consulting. And, ‘CEO factory’ McKinsey’s fingerprints are all over the proponents of that argument.
Founded in London at the start of 2025, Ascentra Labs is led by Paritosh Devbhandari, a former McKinsey consultant who previously led AI product sales at QuantumBlack, and Oliver Thurston, former Head of ML at Mathison AI. The company builds “AI tools for consultants and corporate strategy professionals”, a mission which has so far raised $2 million in pre-seed funding, led by NAP (formerly Cavalry Ventures), with participation from prominent founder-angels including Alan Chang, CEO of Fuse, former Revolut CRO, and Fredrik Hjelm, CEO of Voi.
Despite being one of the world’s largest services markets, valued at $250 billion in 2025, and a huge clamour for its clients to take up the technology, consulting itself has remained largely untouched by recent waves of AI, Ascentra claims – adding that it aims to change this, by taking specific consulting tasks and “building products to accelerate the process”. In particular, its focus is the private equity consulting space, where it believes analyses are most repeatable project to project.
Stefan Walter, co-founder and Managing Partner at NAP, commented, “While most knowledge work has been reshaped by new technology, consulting has remained stubbornly manual. The Ascentra team combines deep industry understanding with technical mastery to finally change that. AI won’t replace consultants, but consultants using Ascentra might.”
In a few months since launch, Ascentra Labs claims it has gained early traction with “top tier consulting firms and private equity firms” – though it has not ventured a specific figure in relation to that boast. Meanwhile, it notes that over 80% of customers are US-based, and the company already counts “three of the world’s top five consulting firms among its users” – with early adopters reportedly enjoying “2-4x faster execution of key project workflows, transforming how teams deliver work.”
CEO Devbhandari added, “People love to talk about how AI is going to remove the need for consultants, and I disagree. Yes, the role will change, but I don’t think the industry goes away. I think the best solutions will come from people within the industry building products around the work they know.”
