Head of Business Development

Compensation: Base salary with significant equity participation (stock options)

Classification: Full-Time, Exempt

Applied Brain Research (A ) has built the most efficient AI models running on edge devices. Our State Space Model architecture delivers competitive accuracy at a fraction of the compute, memory, and power of Transformer-based alternatives. Our TTS models compete with alternatives more than a hundred times their size, and both our ASR and TTS run in real time on constrained silicon that no cloud-scale model can reach.

Prospective customers put our SDK through their own evaluations and see for themselves that our performance claims hold up in their environments, and we’ve been making good progress with the silicon and system partners whose platforms our models run on. What we need now is someone to scale the revenue pipeline.

You will be the first commercial hire and the primary operator of A ’s outbound go-to-market. You will structure and close the technology licenses that put our models into shipping products across robotics, consumer devices, AR, and wearables. You will build the silicon and system partner co-sell motions that pull customers to us. And you will directly shape which markets we prioritize, which languages we build next, and where the product roadmap goes from here.

• Build and close the first cohort of paid POCs and technology licenses with named OEMs and device makers. Target: three to five paid engagements in the first six months, converting to commercial licenses in the second six.
• Structure and close technology license agreements that work for both A  and hardware OEMs. Own the deal from first call through signature.
• Build the silicon and system partner ecosystem, including SoC vendors, system integrators, and design houses. Turn each into an amplifier for A  through reference designs, benchmark publications, and joint account plans.
• Serve as A ’s voice-of-customer. Translate what OEMs actually need into product priorities that inform which languages, model sizes, and features we build next.
• Support the Series A story by developing traction evidence, customer references, and pipeline that our next round depends on.
• Build the commercial function from scratch: process, tooling, pipeline reporting, deal templates. You will hire your first team members when it is time.

We are looking for someone who has already done a version of this and wants to do it again from zero. Specifically:

• Eight or more years of business development, strategic sales, or partnership experience in embedded software or edge AI. Cloud SaaS and hardware component careers do not translate to this role.
• Direct experience structuring and closing technology licenses with OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, or device manufacturers. You have personally quarterbacked the deal, not supported someone who did.
• The ability to sell embedded against cloud. You can articulate the reliability, latency, cost, power, privacy, and system-integration tradeoffs of on-device AI, and win a technical debate with a buyer who arrives assuming cloud is the default.
• Working knowledge of embedded software deployment on constrained silicon: MCUs, MPUs, NPUs, DSPs. You can hold a technical conversation with a customer’s engineering team without needing a translator, and you know why quantization, pruning, and framework choice (ONNX, LiteRT, vendor SDKs) matter to a deal.
• Active relationships across the edge compute ecosystem — SoC vendors, system integrators, design houses — that you can activate in week one.
• Fluency in the AI/ML model landscape for edge and cloud: ASR, TTS, translation, on-device language models, and the competitive dynamics of who provides them.
• C…