Who should I hire first after seed?
Share of the 124 seed-stage AI companies that posted each role
Twelve months to October 2026. A company counts once however many roles it posted.
Roles posted, by share of the group
How big the companies are
105 of the 124 with a known headcount, median 36 employees
What the postings say
- 01Of the 124 seed-stage AI companies we follow, 26 posted a software engineer role in the twelve months to October 2026, 21 a demand generation role and 20 an account executive role.
- 0214 of the 124, 11 in 100, posted an AI or machine learning engineer role.
- 03No role was posted by more than 21 in every 100 companies in the group.
For founders and CEOs
Read the bars as what companies at your stage looked for, not as a sequence. If your next three hires look nothing like the top of the chart, write down why: it is often the right call, and it is the question an investor will ask.
For portfolio talent teams
The share of a group that posted a role is how widely the need runs across it. A role near the top is where portfolio companies compete for the same people.
For hiring managers
Engineering and go-to-market roles both sit near the top, so the people you want are being courted by companies like yours on both sides of the house.
Questions people ask
So who should I hire first after seed?
The postings answer a narrower question: which roles companies at your stage looked for this year. Software engineering, demand generation and account executive roles lead. Which of them comes first for you depends on what is blocking revenue or the product today; the chart shows what peers posted, not the order they hired in.
Does a posting mean the company hired someone?
No. A posting says a company was looking for the role, not that it filled it, and a company that posted the same role five times counts once. The page reads what was posted and listed, never who was hired.
Is a company that posted nothing not hiring?
Not necessarily. Many companies hire through referrals, agencies and their own networks and never post, and many run no public job board we can read. A company with no posting we could read is unknown, so every figure here counts the companies that did post, and is the least of the group that was hiring a role, never the most.
Why are these shares of companies rather than of job postings?
A company that posted ten engineering roles and one that posted one both count once, so a few heavy posters cannot move the picture. A share is how many of every 100 companies in the group posted the role at least once.
Methodology and data
Window
2025-10-17 to 2026-10-17 (study computed 2026-10-17T20:28:40.290Z).
Who is included
- Every share is of the 124 companies in the published study, including the 87 with no posting found, so a share is the least of the group that posted a role, never the most.
- 119 of the 124 are tracked in the CRM and read on weekdays for a public job board; 16 run one we read, listing 189 roles on 2026-10-24. Those live rows are not used above.
Coverage
- 37 of the 124 companies had postings in the window, 489 postings in all.
Limits and caps
- Seed-stage AI companies: twelve months of postings to 2026-10-17, the 20 most recent per company; 17 of the 37 companies with postings sit at that cap, so their counts are floors. Every published group is provisional under the benchmark gate until 90 in 100 of its companies are looked for in both sources and 80 in 100 have their whole year read.
- Order is never read from these figures: with the newest postings per company kept, which role a company posted first cannot be seen.
- A share is stated only over 30 companies or more; below that the page gives counts. Medians, never means. Rules dashboards@1.0.0 (src/lib/dashboards.ts, tested in test/dashboards.test.ts).
When each figure can be stated
| Figure | Stated from |
|---|---|
| Shares of the whole group, every role | today: the group holds more than 30 companies |
| Which role a company posted first, or the order of hires | never from this data: the newest postings per company are kept, so order cannot be read |
Sources
- seed-stage-ai-companies.json (study, version vertical@1.0.0)
- who-should-i-hire-first-after-seed.json (the Sunday recompute of crm.role_openings)
- Dashboard file computed 2026-10-25T11:10:43.581Z; board read of 2026-10-24.
- 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.
- Licence: CC BY 4.0. Reuse with attribution.
Cite this
Related: Hiring Intelligence, the hiring benchmark.
Next step
Scoping the seat your peers posted?
Thirty minutes on what companies at your stage posted, what the seat looks like at your size, and whether it needs a hire at all.