Founding Head of GTM, Essential AI
$225-275k
Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
AI products for enterprise
Be an early applicant
AI products for enterprise
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$225-275k
Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
21-100 employees
Company mission
To build an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally.
Role
Who you are
- Experience building early GTM foundation, partnerships, or revenue motions at a deeply technical company
- Proven ability to scale the business side of a company through ambiguous, zero-to-one stages
- Strong understanding of open-source and open-weight ecosystems and how they create durable value is a plus
- Experience operating as the connective layer between research, product, and external partners
- Comfort operating without a playbook, with high ownership and low ego
- Ability to work closely with technical founders, researchers, and engineers
- We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques
What the job involves
- Essential AI is hiring its Founding Head of GTM & Commercialization to build the company’s first go-to-market and commercialization foundation
- This role is responsible for translating our open-science model platform into real-world adoption through thoughtful partnerships, early customers, and ecosystem engagement without compromising research velocity and technical integrity
- In this role, you will be working closely with the founder and leadership team to define how Essential brings its technology into the world
- Lay the groundwork for early GTM and commercial design partnerships, from strategy through execution
- You'll help define and execute initial business and revenue motions alongside a deeply technical team by identifying and developing business opportunities that emerge from open-weight model capabilities, open research, and developer-first infrastructure
- Enable enterprise partnership opportunities driven by how Essential turns technical breakthroughs into long-term leverage without compromising our research drive and values
- Build and own Essential’s developer engagement strategy: docs, tutorials, demos online and via closed community engagement events - launch and nurture developer community channels (Discord, GitHub, HuggingFace, AMAs, meetups)
- Lead both repeatable offerings and more complex, multi-stakeholder engagements; turning qualified interest into well-scoped, strategically-aligned partnerships
- Instrument the funnel: early signals of model adoption, traction, and market pull
- Help define long-term commercialization paths that scale alongside research progress
Our take
Essential AI is on a mission to make frontier AI accessible to everyone. The team builds open models, easy-to-use tools, and reliable pipelines so anyone can experiment, iterate, and create faster. Founded by a team with experience at Google and other tech giants, the company combines deep know-how with a curiosity-driven approach to AI.
Even though it's still early days, Essential AI is making waves by sharing cutting-edge models and open science along the way. This approach doesn't just accelerate research but it invites collaboration and helps new talent jump in as well as turns complex AI breakthrough into real-world tools people can actually use.
With funding and a growing team too, Essential AI is now focused on building products that can really change how businesses work, making workflows smarter and productivity smoother. By partnering with builders and developers around the world, the company is shaping the future of AI in a way that's open, practical, and pretty exciting.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Dec 2023
$56.5m
SERIES A
Mar 2023
$8.3m
SEED
Total funding: $64.8m
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Ashish Vaswani
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously co-founder and Chief Scientist of Adept AI Labs and Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain.
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