The opportunity

Autonomous wet labs are not a mature category. There is no established buyer journey, no standard contract structure, no obvious comp-set to anchor pricing against. The companies that will benefit most from what Substrate is building, including frontier AI labs, AI-native biotechs, and established pharma organisations, are only beginning to work out how experimental data at scale fits into their development pipelines. The VP of Business Development is the person who will work through that with them.

This is Substrate's first dedicated commercial hire. The founding team has established early traction and a signed first commercial commitment, but the commercial function is, essentially, unbuilt. You will own it end to end: the relationships, the pipeline, the deal structures, the go-to-market motion, and the positioning work that makes Substrate comprehensible and compelling to each of the distinct customer archetypes in our ecosystem.

About Substrate

Substrate is building and operating a network of fully autonomous wet laboratories. We are the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery: cloud-based data production facilities, tightly integrated with AI foundation models, that make high-quality experimental biology as accessible as compute.

We are a small team, four co-founders and a founding hire class now building out, with venture funding and government grants, opening our first node in London and a second node in San Francisco in parallel. The work is hard and the timeline is compressed. We have two scientific verticals live (protein characterisation and functional genomics), a software platform that connects API calls to automated assay execution, and a commercial pipeline that spans foundation model labs, AI biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, and publicly funded research organisations. We are growing to roughly thirty people by early 2027.

The role

You will own Substrate's commercial function end to end. The immediate priority is converting the existing pipeline into signed agreements and establishing the account relationships that will define Substrate's first year of commercial operation. The longer-term priority is building a go-to-market motion that scales as we add nodes and verticals.

The obvious operational pieces are real and important: managing a pipeline across six customer segments, running deal processes from first contact through to executed agreement, representing Substrate at industry conferences and in the rooms where partnering decisions are made, and building the tracking and reporting systems that let the founders make good commercial decisions. Two parts of the role are less standard, and they are why this hire matters so much to Substrate's success.

The first is category creation. Substrate's customers are being asked to adopt a new operating model for experimental work. The BD function is not selling a known service into a known budget line; it is helping customers understand why they need something they have not yet bought before. That requires technical fluency, patience, and an ability to work with customers to scope the specific integration that makes sense for them, whether that is a capacity agreement, a research partnership, or a closed-loop arrangement between their models and our lab.

The second is dual-geography execution. Substrate is building simultaneously in London and San Francisco, which are the two reference hubs for Bio x AI. You will need to be effective in both, which means understanding the US and UK ecosystem in detail and being willing to operate across time zones and geographies as a matter of course.

What you will do in your first twelve months

FIRST 90 DAYS

JUL TO SEP 2026

• Map the existing pipeline in depth: understand the status, blockers, and next steps for every live conversation the founding team is holding.

• Build your own direct relationships with the fifteen to twenty counterparties most likely to be first commercial customers.

• Define the go-to-market segmentation for Substrate's two verticals, distinguishing the commercial motion appropriate for frontier AI labs, AI biotechs, pharma, and publicly funded organisations and the corresponding use cases.

• Develop draft term sheets and commercial frameworks for the two or three deal structures that cover most of the pipeline.

• Identify the key industry events in H2 2026 where Substrate should have a visible presence and lead the planning for those.

MONTHS 4 TO 8 OCT 2026 TO FEB 2027

• Close the first wave of commercial agreements ahead of the London node 1 going live.

• Establish a structured account management approach for the first customers, ensuring their onboarding and early experience is tracked and any issues surface quickly.

• Build out the SF pipeline in parallel with the London pipeline, identifying the ten to fifteen highest-priority targets in the Bay Area and beginning active conversations.

• Develop and refine Substrate's external positioning for each customer segment, working with the founders on the materials that support BD conversations.

• Refine the internal BD infrastructure: CRM, pipeline reporting, deal review cadence.

MONTHS 9 TO 12 MAR TO JUN 2027

• Achieve a commercial pipeline sufficient to underwrite Substrate's node 1 capacity targets for the twelve months following first commercial operation.

• Close the first few SF-originated agreements.

• Identify and assess the customer segments and use cases that should anchor the commercial strategy for Node 2 and beyond.

• Produce a BD playbook that documents the commercial motion in sufficient detail that a second BD hire can be effective within ninety days.

Who you are

The pattern we are looking for is senior commercial experience in AI, biology, and the intersection of both, at a venture-backed company or a technology-intensive organisation where you were selling something novel. You will have a network that includes scientific and commercial decision-makers at AI labs, biotechs, or pharmaceutical companies. You will know how to move a deal from an introduction to a technical conversation to a signed agreement, and you will be comfortable doing that in a context where neither the product nor the pricing nor the customer budget line is yet fully established.

You are technically comfortable. You do not need to be a scientist, but you need to be able to hold a substantive conversation with one. Substrate's customers include researchers and data scientists making architectural decisions about how to integrate external lab infrastructure into their development pipelines, and the BD conversation is often partly a scoping and technical specification conversation. You will be working closely with Anna, co-founder and lead for partnerships and go-to-market, and with the broader founding team. The commercial function does not sit at arm's length from the product or the science; it sits at the centre of how Substrate learns what it needs to build.

We are looking for someone who is energised by the open-ended nature of what this role requires. The playbook does not exist yet. You will write it.

MUST HAVE

• Ten or more years of experience in business development, partnerships, or commercial leadership at a technology or life sciences company.

• A demonstrated track record of closing complex, multi-stakeholder deals in a B2B context.

• Strong existing relationships with commercial and scientific decision-makers at AI companies, biotechs, or pharmaceutical organisations.

• An existing network that spans both the London and San Francisco AI-biology ecosystems.

• Technical fluency sufficient to discuss experimental biology workflows, data infrastructure, or AI-driven drug discovery at a substantive level.

• Experience operating in a pre-commercial or early-commercial context, where deal structures and customer categories are still being defined.

• Willingness to be based in London or San Francisco, with frequent travel to the other location and to New York and Boston.

NICE TO HAVE

• Direct experience in data licensing or platform partnerships in the AI-biology space.

• Experience building and managing a commercial function from scratch, including CRM infrastructure, pipeline tracking, and team hiring.

• Scientific background (BSc or higher) in biology, chemistry, or a related field.

• Prior experience at an autonomous lab, cloud lab, or scientific services company.

• Prior experience in a venture-backed startup with a proven track record of excellent operational execution and high revenue growth.

Why this is unusual

Most senior BD roles in AI and biotech sit inside companies that have already established their category, their pricing, and at least a partial deal template. The work is to execute a known commercial motion against a known buyer profile. This is not that. Substrate is creating a new category of scientific infrastructure in real time. The buyer is working out what they need at the same time as you are working out how to sell it to them. That requires a very different commercial orientation: one that is as much about helping customers think through a new operating model as it is about moving them through a pipeline.

The dual-geography dimension is also unusual. Substrate is building in London and San Francisco in parallel, not sequentially, and the commercial function needs to be effective in both. The London ecosystem (proximity to the UK AI-biology cluster, foundation model organisations, European pharma) and the SF ecosystem (frontier AI labs, Bay Area biotech, the US institutional research base) are different in composition and commercial culture.

Compensation and equity

Compensation is competitive against London and San Francisco market rates for a senior commercial hire at a venture-backed company, calibrated to the seniority and scope of this role. Equity is meaningful, on the standard four-year vesting schedule with a one-year cliff. We are happy to discuss the structure and philosophy in more detail with shortlisted candidates.

We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates at both the London and San Francisco locations.

How we work

Hybrid, with a strong bias toward in-person time at your base location. London candidates are expected to be in person at our King's Cross lab and office most working days during the first six months; San Francisco candidates are expected to be in person at the SF node on a similar basis once the node is operational. Remote days are available and we are sensible about it, but this is a relationship-intensive role and the in-person time matters.

30 days annual leave. A learning and development budget. Quarterly offsites. We are building the rest of the benefits package as the team arrives.

The team you will join

You will report to Anna Huyghues-Despointes, co-founder, who owns partnerships and go-to-market at Substrate. Anna was previously Chief Corporate Development and Strategy Officer at Owkin and an investor at Balderton Capital. You will work closely with the full founding team: Oli Hoy, who leads infrastructure build and lab delivery; Alexey Morgunov, who leads the AI and scientific intelligence work; and Mostafa ElSayed, CEO and founder of Automata, who leads the investor and government engagement side of Substrate.

Substrate is a small team growing to roughly thirty people by early 2027. This is a founding-team-adjacent hire; you will have direct access to the people making product, scientific, and strategic decisions, and your commercial work will directly shape those decisions.

How to apply

Apply via Ashby. Include a short message describing who you are, why this role makes sense for you now, and what you think the hardest part of it will be is more useful to us than a cover letter.

We will move fast.

If you are not certain you are a fit, send a note anyway. The role is new and the framing will evolve; we would rather have a conversation with the right person and refine the role.

Substrate is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions on merit, scope-fit, and the strength of the working relationship we expect to build with each hire. Applications welcome from candidates of any background.