Head of Business Development

About the job Mercata is hiring its first commercial lead, reporting to the CEO. You own the pipeline end to end: sourcing conversations with fundamental investing hedge funds, running demos alongside the founder, and converting pilots into paid production contracts. The target market is specific and reachable: thousands of fundamental investing hedge funds between $50M and $2B in AUM. We know where they are; we built the database and the outbound machine. Your job is to get us into the room and get the deal signed. Now the wrinkle. We are a seed-stage company and cannot pay a market salary today. Compensation starts as equity plus commission on revenue you close, and a full salary switches on at our next funding round. That is less circular than it sounds: the round closes on customer traction, and customer traction is this job. The person who lands our next two or three funds is funding their own seat, and will have proven with signed contracts that they earned it. If you need a paycheck next month, this is the wrong role and we are telling you now. If you want to be the person who built revenue from zero, keep reading. We believe the fundamental investing firms of the future will run on data infrastructure and workflow tools built for how they actually work. The payoff is sharper thinking, more coverage per analyst, more alpha. We built Mercata inside a $600M long/short that has paid for it in production since April, and that fund's COO and CIO also invested in the company directly. About Mercata Mercata is a hedge fund's brain. Fundamental investing hedge funds are full of brilliant people who can't remember what they know when it counts, so we built the firm's memory: not just the records like an RMS, but the reasoning that produced them, the debates, the objections, the names the team passed on, all of it linked to the filings, news, and market data moving every day. The memo keeps the decision; Mercata keeps what produced it. Because it sits in the research flow, every question the team asks becomes part of the firm's memory, and the longer it runs, the smarter the firm becomes. Everything it says is citable back to a source. Think of it as the tireless associate who has been in every meeting, hears everything, and forgets nothing. What you would own - The full funnel: outreach by email, LinkedIn, and phone; demos; pilots; letters of intent; contracts - Our existing machine: a database of thousands of qualified funds, warmed sending infrastructure, and live campaigns you take over and scale - Deal strategy with the CEO: pricing, pilot design, and the push to our next customers - The weekly pipeline number we report to the board Requirements - You have sold data, research, or workflow software into hedge funds or asset managers, and you can name the deals - A deep network of $50M–$2B AUM fundamental funds who’s CIO and COOs would take your calls - Full-cycle: capable of sourcing, running and closing deals without a team behind you - Clear-eyed about the compensation structure above; it should read to you as opportunity, not risk - Genuine conviction that the fundamental investing firms of the future will run on infrastructure like this Benefits - Founding-hire equity grant, sized for a first commercial hire - Commission on revenue you close, from day one - Market salary switches on at our next funding close. Exact numbers on the first call.