John Ellis
Twenty-five years in UK construction, starting as a labourer for bricklayers and plasterers and working through the trades before qualifying as a quantity surveyor. Thirteen of those years have been in commercial roles across Mace, Morgan Sindall, Esh Group, Elliott and Modulaire, and Lindum, delivering in excess of £275 million of construction works. The same commercial blindspots turn up in every one of them. Fragmented data, eroded margin, decisions made on instinct because the systems cannot surface the answer fast enough. John founded ConstructEther because the industry does not need another tool bolted onto the stack, it needs the operating system underneath it.
The commercial career began at Mace in 2012, on a scheme that included a river diversion and multiple new bridges, learning take-off, procurement and scope writing to Tier 1 standards. He moved to Morgan Sindall in 2015 to deliver a new science laboratory at Huddersfield University and an assisted living scheme, 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 Grade II listed transformation into assisted living apartments, and mentoring a trainee surveyor from entry level to project surveyor in four years. A move into modular delivery with Elliott and Modulaire produced an academy tender win and end-to-end visibility of prefabricated construction under a government framework. Lindum Group followed as Senior Quantity Surveyor, with full commercial accountability from inception to final account.
More recently he led a six-month commercial engagement on 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 to build exactly that.
Twenty-five years in, the conclusion was unavoidable. Construction does not have a software problem, it has a fragmentation problem. At ConstructEther, John sets product direction, commercial strategy and investor relations.
