Handover K
Founding Account Executive, AI Ventures
Three AI start-ups.Three founders. An opportunity to join an early stage team as founding AE upon success.
Full-time · CDD 7 months · Paris
TL;DR
Position: Founding Account Executive, AI Ventures
Location: Paris (on site with the founders, on the ground with industrial clients)
Salary: €80K fixed + €20K variable (gross annual) + CDD bonus
Contract: Fixed-term (CDD), January to July 2027
Reports to: JP, Revenue Partner
Next move: Founding AE in one of the ventures you sold for, or Entrepreneur In Residence at OSS Ventures
You've spent 5 to 10 years selling enterprise B2B. You've opened accounts from scratch.
OSS Ventures builds AI-native B2B SaaS for industrial operations. Since 2019: 25 companies built, 11 Series A, 4,000+ sites live across Europe and the US. We don't hand founders a playbook and wish them luck. We build the go-to-market with them, deal by deal.
You'll be the one who opens the first enterprise accounts of three ventures in their first commercial year, side by side with their founders. And you'll run the GTM system that keeps the pipeline full.
What You'll Build Here
You'll sell for three early-stage AI ventures going after industrial groups. Not as an SDR booking meetings. Not as a consultant writing a sales plan nobody reads. As the person who opens the account, runs the cycle and brings the deal home.
Your time, three ways:
First sales (50%). Open and qualify enterprise accounts, run discovery, map the buying committee, drive the cycle to proposal. Every deal you open becomes the venture's pipeline and its first playbook.
GTM strategy and system building (25%). A weekly session with each founder: positioning, bets, one-pagers, sales assets, what to test next.
GTM system run (25%). Keep pipeline and account data sharp, run the weekly account signal scan, work in our AI-assisted GTM stack every single day.
What you walk away with:
A front-row view of how enterprise traction is built from zero, across several products at once, in the time it takes to watch it happen once at a single start-up.
A track record that makes you the obvious founding AE for the venture you pick, or a serious Entrepreneur In Residence candidate.
Trajectory
This role is a bridge into the OSS Ventures galaxy.
Founding Account Executive: the goal is that you join one of the ventures you sold for as their first sales hire, carrying a pipeline you built yourself.
Venture team: Entrepreneur In Residence, depending on fit and results.
What's In It For You
Years of founding sales, compressed into seven months. Several products, several founders, one steep learning curve.
Sparring partner position. You participate in shaping positioning and pricing. You don't just execute.
One month to get sharp before you carry the number. Full onboarding on our GTM stack, methods and AI skills.
Speed is the only metric that counts. No quota theatre. No 40-page account plans written for an internal review.
Required Profile
Non-negotiable:
5 to 10 years in enterprise B2B sales, consultative selling, long cycles, many stakeholders.
You've opened new accounts from a blank page, ideally as a founding AE or early sales hire.
Founders take you seriously: you challenge a plan, you don't just run it.
Rigorous qualification (MEDDIC or equivalent) and real CRM discipline.
You pick up a tool stack fast and AI is already part of how you work.
Professional French and English.
Nice to have:
You've already been the first sales hire in a SaaS or AI start-up.
You've sold to plant, operations, supply chain, quality or procurement leaders.
How You Operate
You move before you're 100% sure, then iterate.
You're as sharp in a steering committee with a COO as on a call with a plant manager.
When a deal stalls, you say so early, clearly, with a next step attached.
Out of your comfort zone is where you do your best work.
What Success Looks Like
At 1 month:
You own the weekly GTM sessions and the pipeline reviews of each venture.
The first qualified enterprise opportunities are live for the ventures you work on.
By the end of July 2027:
Each venture has qualified enterprise opportunities at proposal stage, or already won.
Founders rate you above 90 NPS.
You know the AI start-up game from the inside.
This Role Is Not For You If…
You need a full playbook, an SDR team and inbound leads to perform.
Your track record is built on transactional or inbound SaaS, digital ads, ESN staffing or headhunting.
You think AI is hype and won't change B2B sales for another 3 to 5 years.
Seven months feels like a risk, not a launchpad.
About OSS Ventures
Our mission
Build and invest in technological companies that accelerate the pivot of our production model
toward a desirable one. In practice: B2B SaaS for blue-collar industries — manufacturing,
construction, logistics.
Our story
OSS was founded with a simple bet: go into factories, understand the real problems, and
build software that actually works in the field. Six years later, that bet has compounded.
We've built 22 companies from scratch, deployed across 3,800+ industrial sites, with
200,000+ daily users and €40M ARR across the portfolio.
Our first cohort — Fabriq, Mercateam, Kraaft, MyC — have done or are entering Series B territory, with one exit expected per year starting now.
We're building 6 companies this year, 8 in 2027.
Two months ago, we closed a €44M fund — our largest to date. Our investors include
Decathlon Pulse, Teknor Apex, Tikehau Capital, and Famille Peugeot.
We operate from Paris and Boston, with 5 portfolio companies now generating ~40% of their new ARR from the US market.
As far as we know, we're in the top 2.5% of all funds worldwide by performance. We think we
have a shot at building a generational institution.
We have the capital, the traction, the team— and a different culture.
Our ambition
We will never be a 1,000-person organization. We will always be sub-50 people — high
individual autonomy, high reach, high impact. The next 3 years are about proving we can be
world-class at all three fronts: building, investing, and scaling portfolio companies into
category leaders — on both sides of the Atlantic.
How we work
We build AI companies by working inside factories, alongside industry experts, solving
problems where they actually exist. We are embedded — not external. We go to the shop
floor before we write a line of code. We don't do remote conviction.
Four pillars structure everything we do:
Build (product-led, hands-on with founders),
Network (connecting startups, manufacturers, and partners),
Scale (fund capital + global expansion),
Transform (partner success, tangible measurable value).
Our values
They describe how we behave and what we believe in. When in doubt, they are our guide.
🤗🤖 Human judgement. Machine speed.
We trust human judgement and care about human connection. When it comes to execution, we use every machine we can, starting with AI.
🏈 Play world class.
We play at the highest level and train like athletes. Every team member is a world-class player, and the game changes every day.
🤝 Trustful relationships. Performing partnerships.
We work with people we trust and act in good faith. Feedback is a daily practice: we say the hard things when they’re true, because we want our partners to win.
🔪 We eat what we kill.
We take risks and believe in a fair balance of risk and reward. Work is done when results can be measured, and we reward value creation generously.
📈 Compound the system.
The system is the star, not the individual. We automate whatever we can to achieve outsized impact with a small team and a healthy work-life balance.
🛖 Build something the world needs.
We are builders first. We want real impact on our portfolio companies and on the world, and we want people to use what we build.