John Ellis
Thirteen years across UK commercial construction — Tier 1 contracting through specialist regional, modular delivery, and now enterprise — and the same commercial blindspots show up in every one of them. Fragmented data, eroded margin, decisions made on instinct because the systems can't surface the answer fast enough. John founded ConstructEther because the industry doesn't need another tool bolted onto the stack — it needs the operating system underneath it.
Starting at Mace in 2012 on a Sainsbury's scheme that included a river diversion and multiple new bridges, learning take-offs, procurement, and scope writing at Tier 1 standards. Moving to Morgan Sindall in 2015 to deliver a new science laboratory at Huddersfield University and return an assisted living scheme at 16% target margin — a formative lesson in protecting commercial position through proactive risk mitigation rather than reactive control.
Nearly five years at Esh Group followed, including the award-winning Cookridge Hospital conversion, a £9.4M Grade II listed transformation into 63 assisted living apartments, and mentoring a trainee surveyor from entry level to project surveyor in four years. A move into modular delivery with Elliott / Modulaire produced the £25M Northampton Boys Academy tender win and end-to-end visibility of prefabricated construction under a government framework. Lindum Group followed as Senior Quantity Surveyor, leading £10.5M of schemes with full commercial accountability from inception to final account.
More recently he led a six-month commercial engagement on £25M of Northern Rail schemes — critical-infrastructure work that broadened the experience base into public-sector delivery. The thesis behind ConstructEther crystallised in the years that followed: at enterprise scale, AI and automation get adopted in pockets but rarely woven into the underlying operating system that ties commercial control together. He founded ConstructEther in 2026 to build exactly that.
At ConstructEther, John sets product direction, commercial strategy, and investor relations.
Every workflow on the platform exists because he needed it on a project and it wasn't there.
