Original research · Human in the Loop Talent
What Seed-Stage AI Companies Posted For: Twelve Months to October 2026
- Revenue leadership searches at DualEntry, Finmile, Eizen and Bynry Inc. Each advertised a sales leadership role this year, and InstaLILY AI advertised a sales recruiter role. Ask whether a leader was appointed and whether further sales capacity is planned.
- AI engineering concentrated in five teams. allNeurons, Kaya AI, Arcade.dev, BAY6.AI and Jobright.ai advertised substantial AI/ML demand, and Kaya AI and BAY6.AI also opened a search for an AI leader. Competition for AI engineers at this stage is with these teams, not the whole cohort.
- Post-raise hiring plans and a hard-to-fill finance seat. Eight companies raised in the last six months, Kyndred, Layer and Tangent Robotics among them with no posting yet, and avante posted its finance leadership seat four times in five weeks. Ask about hiring plans and whether repeated finance postings describe one continuing search.
Among 124 tracked seed-stage AI companies, 37 had postings this year: software engineering at 26 companies, demand generation at 21, account executives at 20 and product management at 16. AI or machine-learning engineering postings came from 14 companies. Eight companies had a recorded funding round in the last six months.
Who this is for. Founders of seed and pre-seed AI companies deciding their first functional hires, and the investors and recruiters who help them. Lens. The founder-to-team transition: which function a small AI company staffs first, when the first go-to-market seats appear, and how AI engineering hiring concentrates in a few teams.
What we observed
| Role family | Companies | Share of companies | Postings | Share of postings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software engineer | 26 | 21% | 127 | 26% |
| Demand generation / growth marketing | 21 | 17% | 53 | 11% |
| Account executive | 20 | 16% | 40 | 8% |
| Product management | 16 | 13% | 33 | 7% |
| AI / ML engineer | 14 | 11% | 42 | 9% |
| Data / analytics | 9 | 7% | 27 | 6% |
| Talent / recruiting | 6 | 5% | 11 | 2% |
| Operations | 6 | 5% | 6 | 1% |
| Finance | 5 | 4% | 8 | 2% |
| Sales leader (CRO, VP Sales, Head of Sales) | 4 | 3% | 8 | 2% |
| SDR / BDR | 4 | 3% | 6 | 1% |
| Engineering leader (CTO, VP Engineering) | 4 | 3% | 5 | 1% |
| People operations / HR | 3 | 2% | 9 | 2% |
| Customer success | 3 | 2% | 6 | 1% |
Posted in the last 60 days
37 companies posted 227 roles: software engineer at 21, account executive at 14, ai / ml engineer at 12, demand generation / growth marketing at 11, product management at 10, data / analytics at 8.
| Company | Title | Posted |
|---|---|---|
| DualEntry | Head of Product Design | 5 Oct 2026 |
| DualEntry | VP Sales | 4 Oct 2026 |
| Kaya AI | Head of AI and Labs | 17 Sept 2026 |
| avante | Head of Finance | 4 Sept 2026 |
| HuLoop Automation | Vice President of Customer Services & Success (CS&S) | 2 Sept 2026 |
| BAY6.AI | Vice President Delivery | 24 Aug 2026 |
| avante | Head of Finance & Operations | 6 Aug 2026 |
| avante | Head of Finance & Operations | 5 Aug 2026 |
| avante | Head of Finance & Operations | 5 Aug 2026 |
| InstaLILY AI | Director, Office of the CEO | 7 May 2026 |
| HeyDonto AI | VP of Product — HeyDonto | 29 Dec 2025 |
| HeyDonto AI | VP of Product — HeyDonto | 16 Dec 2025 |
| HeyDonto AI | VP of Product | 11 Dec 2025 |
| Finmile | Head of Sales | 4 Dec 2025 |
Company events in the last 180 days
- Kyndred: Kyndred raised pre-seed (Seed / Series A raised, 10 Oct 2026)
- Layer: Layer raised seed (Seed / Series A raised, 10 Oct 2026)
- Tangent Robotics: Tangent Robotics raised pre-seed (Seed / Series A raised, 10 Oct 2026)
Potential talent opportunities
- Opened a search for a VP Sales and a Head of Product Design in October.
- In the year: 4 demand generation, 2 revenue operations, 2 product management, 1 GTM engineering and 1 account executive postings, all within the last quarter, plus an Enterprise Marketing Lead and an Executive Assistant, Office of the CEO in the most recent weeks.
What this usually means. Ask whether these advertised searches led to appointments, how the role scope evolved and what capacity the team plans next. The posting pattern provides a reason for that conversation; the company can confirm its current needs.
- Opened a search for a Head of AI and Labs in September.
- In the year: 4 AI/ML engineering and 2 AI leadership postings, 4 product management, 2 demand generation, 2 software engineer and 1 customer success, most of them in the last quarter.
What this usually means. Ask whether these advertised searches led to appointments, how the role scope evolved and what capacity the team plans next. The posting pattern provides a reason for that conversation; the company can confirm its current needs.
- Opened a search for a Head of Finance in September, after three Head of Finance & Operations postings in August.
- In the year: 5 software engineer, 4 demand generation, 4 finance, 3 customer success, 1 account executive and 1 SDR postings, all in the last quarter, plus a Senior Customer Success Manager in October.
What this usually means. Ask whether these advertised searches led to appointments, how the role scope evolved and what capacity the team plans next. The posting pattern provides a reason for that conversation; the company can confirm its current needs.
- Opened a search for a Recruiter, Sales in October.
- In the year: 1 account executive, 1 revenue operations, 1 talent, 1 product management and 1 software engineer posting, plus a Director, Office of the CEO in May.
What this usually means. Ask whether these advertised searches led to appointments, how the role scope evolved and what capacity the team plans next. The posting pattern provides a reason for that conversation; the company can confirm its current needs.
- The AI engineering cluster. Cylake: 3 AI/ML and 14 software engineer postings, an Applied AI Engineer opened in October. Arcade.dev: 5 AI/ML, 4 product management, 2 engineering leadership and 2 account executive postings. allNeurons: 7 AI/ML. BAY6.AI: 4 AI/ML and 1 AI leadership, a Vice President Delivery opened in August. Jobright.ai: 5 AI/ML.
What this usually means. Ask whether these advertised searches led to appointments, how the role scope evolved and what capacity the team plans next. The posting pattern provides a reason for that conversation; the company can confirm its current needs.
- Each raised a pre-seed or seed round in October; three of the 8 companies with a funding event in the last six months.
- No posting from any of the three in the year.
What this usually means. Ask whether these advertised searches led to appointments, how the role scope evolved and what capacity the team plans next. The posting pattern provides a reason for that conversation; the company can confirm its current needs.
Working on one of these seats, or a search that has stalled? Discuss an emerging hiring need, or explore recruiting support.
What this means
Who these companies are
This is a young group. Median headcount sits at 36 employees, and the bulk of companies fall between 20 and 99 people — early teams still shaping their first org chart. New York and San Francisco are the two biggest hubs, with 15 and 13 companies respectively, though the group is spread wide enough that no single city defines it.
At this size, every hire is a structural decision. That's visible in what they're posting for: there's no single department doing all the hiring, and the split between engineering and go-to-market is closer than you'd expect this early.
Engineering and go-to-market roles both appear
Software engineering appeared at 26 companies, demand generation at 21, account executives at 20 and product management at 16. These totals show demand across several functions. Establishing whether a particular company built those functions together requires its dated posting history.
AI/ML engineering leaned into the last quarter, on a small base
AI or ML engineer is the one role family whose postings leaned into the last quarter. That is a lean worth noting, not a cohort-wide shift: it rests on 11 postings at 4 companies.
Over the whole year, AI/ML engineering reached 14 of the 124 companies (11%) and 42 of the 490 postings (9%).
Dedicated AI engineering roles
AI or machine-learning engineering appeared at 14 companies and accounted for 42 postings, or 9% of the 490 found. The 11% figure describes the share of the 124 companies, rather than the share of postings. Dedicated AI titles capture only part of AI work: general engineering roles can include AI responsibilities too.
Companies with substantial observed posting activity
AlgorithmX, Arcade.dev, avante, BAY6.AI, Circle Health, Codeable, CodeplixAI and Cylake had substantial observed posting activity. These observations are useful starting points for conversations about team plans; they do not establish a complete ranking of hiring volume.
What to watch
Sales leadership searches opened at 4 companies in the year. The signals to watch are whether AI engineer hiring spreads beyond the handful of teams doing most of it, and whether the companies that raised in the last six months, Kyndred, Layer and Tangent Robotics among the 8, start posting.
Go-to-market postings were still arriving in the most recent weeks: RECRIVIO a Business Development Specialist, OpenObserve a Customer Success Engineer, Leadmetrics an Inside Sales Executive, DualEntry an Enterprise Marketing Lead, InstaLILY AI a Recruiter, Sales.
What to do next
Founder or CEO
- Compare the role families your peers posted first with your own next three hires; where they differ, write down why.
- If you are about to hire a first account executive or SDR before a sales leader, decide who owns sales until that leader arrives.
- The companies that raised in the last six months are the ones to watch for what a round funds first.
Investor
- Five teams do most of the cohort's AI engineering hiring; a portfolio company building an AI team is competing with them for engineers.
- Companies with no posting found may be hiring through referrals or agencies; ask them directly how they are hiring.
Talent leader or recruiter
- AI/ML engineering demand sits in a handful of companies, named under Potential talent opportunities.
- Where a company is hiring account executives or SDRs without a revenue leader, expect the leadership search to follow.
Discuss an emerging hiring need, or read the related studies: which roles precede growth, Valor Ventures portfolio, Vista Equity Partners portfolio.
Questions people ask
What are the top recruiting strategies for seed-stage startups?
Start with the business outcome, define the role, and use a consistent assessment process. The study shows postings across engineering and go-to-market functions, but it does not compare recruiting strategies or measure which approach succeeds.
What's the hiring strategy for startups at the seed stage?
The observed companies advertised engineering, product and go-to-market roles. That does not establish the order in which they staffed those functions. A useful hiring plan should reflect the company’s roadmap, customer commitments and available runway.
Who recruits AI engineers for seed-stage companies?
We do not track recruiting firms or sourcing channels, so we cannot say who recruits for these companies. What the postings show is which companies advertised AI or ML engineering roles this year: 14 of the 124, led by allNeurons (7 postings), Kaya AI (6), Arcade.dev (5), BAY6.AI (5) and Jobright.ai (5).
Which seed AI companies had substantial posting activity?
AlgorithmX, Arcade.dev, avante, BAY6.AI, Circle Health, Codeable, CodeplixAI and Cylake had substantial observed posting activity. Posting counts do not measure revenue growth, headcount growth or completed hires, so this study does not rank the fastest-growing companies.
Are seed-stage AI companies hiring leadership roles?
Leadership searches opened at a few companies in the year, most recently DualEntry (Head of Product Design and VP Sales, October), Kaya AI (Head of AI and Labs, September), avante (Head of Finance, September), HuLoop Automation (Vice President of Customer Services & Success, September) and BAY6.AI (Vice President Delivery, August). Whether each seat has since filled is the question to ask the company.
Methodology and data
Who is included
Companies building AI-native products that announced a seed or pre-seed round in the last 12 months, 5 to 150 employees, selling to businesses or developers. Not consultancies, not agencies, not open-source projects without a company.
This is a tracked sample, not a verified complete census. 124 companies are included; 37 have observed posting history and 105 have a headcount reading. A company without a found posting may still be hiring through other channels. Company shares use all 124 tracked companies as the denominator.
Collection limit: the 20 most recent postings per company; 17 companies reached that limit. Counts describe observed postings, not unique vacancies or completed hires. Reposts can represent the same search, and limited histories cannot establish a complete company ranking or a hiring growth rate.
124 companies in the census; 105 with a headcount reading; job boards read for 0 (the live board read has not run for this panel yet, so open roles are unknown, not zero); 490 postings over the last twelve months for 37 of them, the 20 most recent a company (17 companies at that cap, so earlier quarters are undercounted); signals cover the last 180 days. Fact sheet computed 2026-10-14; study written 2026-10-14; dataset version vertical@1.0.0; intelligence rules intelligence@0.2.1; claim check: pass. The executive summary, the sections, the FAQ answers and the limitations were revised by Human in the Loop Talent on 2026-10-14 against this fact sheet: The generated narrative described a twelve-month posting archive as "Right Now", misread the AI engineering recent share (55% of 11 uncapped postings in the last 90 days) as "55% concentrated in four companies", read unmapped leadership seats as "no confirmed CRO change or vacant seat", and called the sixty-day posting figures "what's currently posted". This revision corrects each against the same fact sheet (archive 2025-10-14 to 2026-10-14) and keeps the method to the limitations paragraph.
How the census and the article were made
Original research computed from the signal layer of the recruiting CRM behind Human in the Loop Talent: public job boards, company news, funding announcements and headcount readings, collected continuously for every tracked company and recomputed every Sunday. A figure is published only when the sample supports it; the data behind every page is published as JSON next to it.
- The category is defined in one sentence (who is in, who is out). A search plan turns it into a structured company-database query (keywords, products, funding stages, founding year, countries, size band) and six to ten web-search angles.
- Three feeds enumerate the companies: the structured query against a company database; the list pages a researcher would read for each angle, fetched whole and read for every company they name; and bulk firmographic enrichment (headcount, industry, headquarters) for any company that arrived without them. The lists merge by company domain, then by name.
- Companies that pass the inclusion gate (category, size band, geography) become tracked companies in the CRM, so the signal layer watches the whole category: job postings every weekday, news, funding and leadership changes. The last twelve months of each company's postings are read from a job-postings archive, so the study sees a year of hiring, not only what is open today.
- After at least a week of observation a fact sheet is computed in code: headcount bands, twelve months of hiring by role family and quarter, open roles, open leadership searches, tools named in job posts, revenue-seat changes, funding and AI initiatives over 180 days.
- The study is written from the fact sheet only. A second pass checks every number, name, title and date against the sheet and strips anything it does not contain; the claim-check result is shown on the page.
- A census under ten companies is not published. Studies are rewritten when the census is at least a week old and the last study is older than four weeks.
Key figures
from companies.n
from hiring.history_12m.by_family[family=engineer]
from hiring.history_12m.fastest_growing
from hiring.history_12m.ai_hiring
from hiring_now_60d
from companies.median_employees
median 36 · 20-49: 38, 50-99: 23, 100-199: 12, 1-19: 32 · 105 of 124 with a reading
New York (15), San Francisco (13), Dover (4), Dallas (2), San Diego (2)
37 companies, 227 roles by posting date
seat holders not mapped yet for this panel
8 funding · 0 M&A · 6 AI initiatives · 1 stack changes
The family whose postings lean most into the last 90 days, measured below the cap: AI / ML engineer (55% of its 11 uncapped postings, at 4 companies; a flat year would put 25% there).
Postings by quarter are not shown: with 17 companies at the archive cap, earlier quarters are undercounted and a quarterly series would read as growth that is an artefact of the cap.
Limitations
This study covers the 124 companies in the seed-stage AI census, 105 of which have a headcount reading. The study reads a twelve-month archive of job postings, not live job boards, so it reports what was posted and when rather than which roles are open today. The hiring figures come from a twelve-month archive of postings (2025-10-14 to 2026-10-14) covering 37 companies and 490 postings, capped at the 20 most recent per company; 17 companies sit at that cap, so their counts are floors and no quarter-by-quarter trend can be read. The sixty-day figures are posting dates from that archive and the daily board reads, not a read of what is open. Leadership seat holders are not mapped, so nothing is known about CRO changes. Company events (funding, AI initiatives) cover the 180 days to 2026-10-14 and only the sources the CRM reads. Months named in the text are the dates the postings appeared in this archive.
- 87 of 124 companies have no postings in the twelve-month archive. That is unknown, not idle: the archive covers public job boards and does not reach every company.
- The archive keeps the 20 most recent postings per company and 17 of 37 companies with postings sit at that cap. Their counts are floors, their older quarters are undercounted, and a quarter-by-quarter trend cannot be read from this panel.
- This fact sheet does not carry each company's headcount, so size-scaled thresholds use the panel median (36 employees) for every company. Rows will sharpen when the panel is recomputed with per-company headcount.
- Open roles have not been read live from these companies' job boards, so no row states a current open-role count. "Posted in the last 60 days" (227 roles at 37 companies) is a posting date in the archive or the daily board reads, not a live read of the board.
- Leadership seat holders are not mapped for this panel. Any statement that no CRO changed means none was recorded, not that none happened.
- Company events cover the 180 days to 2026-10-14 and only the sources the CRM reads (company news, LinkedIn posts, ColdIQ); an event missing here may still have happened.
- 105 of 124 companies have a headcount reading; the rest are counted in the census without a size.
- Nothing on this page states that a hire caused growth or that a company will hire; the panel records correlations and the page says which ones.
Dataset and versions
- Fact sheet and study: /research/verticals/seed-stage-ai-companies.json (version vertical@1.0.0, computed 2026-10-14).
- Company opportunity table: rendered on this page by rules intelligence@0.2.1; not offered as a separate download until redistribution terms for the underlying posting archive are confirmed.
- Revision log: 11 revisions since 2026-10-10, read from the git history of the published JSON.
- Licence: CC BY 4.0. Reuse with attribution.
Cite this
Related: all research, which roles precede growth, startup recruiting, post-funding hiring.
Making your first functional hires?
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