Founders Associate

The opportunity

The $1 trillion consulting industry is powered by some of the world's brightest minds, yet they remain trapped in manual, inefficient workflows — spreadsheet orchestration, slide-deck assembly, and fragmented data synthesis. We are moving the industry from "human-plus-tools" to autonomous agency.

The Founders Associate role is the founders' force multiplier. You'll work directly alongside our two co-founders and the Chief of Staff across every dimension of building the company: fundraising, hiring, partnerships, go-to-market, investor relations, operations, and whatever else shows up tomorrow. There is no fixed job description because the job changes every week. What stays constant: you're in the room for every critical decision, and you co-own the execution that follows.

Why this matters

Every engagement Riplo touches makes the system smarter. The context, the judgment, the work product — all of it compounds into a knowledge layer no individual consultant or competing tool can replicate. The firms that move first on this category don't just work faster; they build a structural advantage. The next twelve months are when the category gets defined. Joining now means working on the problems that determine whether Riplo becomes the default — not future hypotheticals, but the actual decisions being made right now.

Riplo was founded by an ex-McKinsey / BCG / DeepMind / Hg founding team, and emerged from stealth in March 2026 with $3.1M in pre-seed funding led by Cherry Ventures, joined by Blue Lion Capital, partners from McKinsey and BCG, the founders of QuantumBlack, and angels from OpenAI, Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Hg Capital.

What you'll do

Your scope will evolve week to week, but the initial areas:

• Fundraising and investor relations. End-to-end process support: deck iterations, data room, investor pipeline, due diligence coordination.

• Hiring and talent operations. Source, screen, and close candidates across engineering, product, and commercial roles.

• Strategic research. Market sizing, competitive landscapes, partnership opportunities, pricing models. Synthesise complexity into recommendations the founders can act on.

• Partnerships and BD. Identify and qualify integration, channel, and technology partners. Support early deal structuring.

• GTM scaffolding. ICP definition, target account lists, sales collateral, and the operational scaffolding for Riplo's first commercial motions.

• Operations and AI-first company building. Systems, legal, finance, vendor management, and the hundred other things that have no owner yet. AI-first is the default.

Who we're looking for

• 0–4 years in a high-intensity environment: top-tier consulting, investment banking, venture capital, private equity, or an early-stage startup. Exceptional recent graduates welcome.

• Outstanding analytical and problem-solving instincts. You can build a financial model, structure a market analysis, and write a compelling narrative with equal comfort.

• Sharp written and verbal communication. Your investor updates, candidate emails, and partnership briefs don't need editing.

• Extreme ownership. You see gaps, you fill them, you don't wait to be told.

• High comfort with ambiguity and context-switching.

• Fluency with modern AI tools. You use them everywhere to accelerate your work, not as a novelty.

• Fluent English.

What's in it for you

• Competitive salary plus meaningful equity.

• A front-row seat to the AI revolution with your hands on the wheel.

• Direct daily access to founders who've built and backed category-defining companies.

• More context, responsibility, and direct impact than people with far more senior titles at larger companies.

Location

London is the primary base. Remote is possible only for exceptional talent.