Head of Business Development

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

Classification: Full-Time, Exempt

The opportunity

Applied Brain Research (ABR) 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 ABR’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.

What you’ll do in the first twelve months

• 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 ABR 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 ABR through reference designs, benchmark publications, and joint account plans.
• Serve as ABR’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.

What we’re looking for

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.
• Comfort operating without infrastructure. You have built processes from scratch in a venture-backed environment before, and you prefer that to running someone else’s playbook.
• Bachelor’s degree in EE, CS, CE, or a related technical discipline. Advanced degree is a plus.

This role is probably not for you if

• Your career is enterprise SaaS or cloud API licensing. The deal motion is different.
• You have sold semiconductor chips into OEMs and are looking to move into software. The sell-side dynamics are opposite.
• You need a large team, an existing pipeline, or a marketing engine to be effective.
• You prefer inbound partnership operations to outbound revenue generation.
• You are not comfortable with pre-Series A base compensation offset by meaningful equity.

What we offer

• A base salary calibrated to our pre-Series A stage, with a defined path to market rate at Series A close.
• Meaningful equity participation with refresh grants at strong performance.
• A senior commercial seat as ABR’s first business development hire, at a company whose technology is proven and whose market is arriving now.
• Remote-friendly work across the US or Canada. Regular travel to customers, silicon and system partners, and industry events (US, Canada, APAC primarily; occasional Europe and Middle East).
• Direct access to the CEO and CTO as your daily working partners.

About Applied Brain Research

ABR was founded on the belief that AI reaches its full potential only when it runs where the data lives — at the edge. Our patented State Space Model architecture underpins a family of speech models that run in real time on the constrained silicon inside devices from AR glasses to warehouse robots, with an on-device language roadmap building on that foundation. Our customers license our models; our silicon and system partners build reference designs around them. We are pre-Series A, backed by seed investors, targeting Series A in the coming months on the traction this role will help amplify.

Interested in joining the ABR team? We are always looking for people who want to help shape the future of edge AI.