Founder-in-Residence

LG NOVA, LG Electronics North America Innovation Center

You are not applying for a job. You are here to found LG's next company.

LG NOVA builds new ventures and spins them out as real businesses. We are looking for a small group of founders to validate and launch the next one, with LG's balance sheet and government relationships behind them. We are recruiting now for our next Founder in Residence cohort, with the first 90 day validation sprint targeted to begin on December 1, 2026.

This is a founding seat, not an advisory one. If the venture proves out, you lead it as Founder and CEO.

The mandate is open on purpose

We are not handing you a problem to solve. The strongest ventures come from founders who already see something the market has missed, so we are domain agnostic by design. While we stay open on the domain, we are focused on AI enabled software ventures with strong commercial potential.

We are looking for candidates with experience building, leading, or commercializing businesses at the core AI layer or adjacent products/tools, rather than mainly building applications using AI. The strongest candidates bring experience and a solid understanding of the AI lifecycle, including model training or fine tuning, evaluation, deployment, inference, optimization, and production scale operation. This experience may come from technical development, product leadership, or building and commercializing AI platforms and infrastructure businesses. Hands-on engineering experience is valuable but not required. Relevant areas of business may include:

• AI Management, Development Platforms
• Agentic Coding, Dev Automation
• Agent Orchestration, Workflow Automation
• AI Safety, Security, Compliance
• Data Infrastructure, Data Generation, Curation

Relevant experience may include model training infrastructure, inference and serving, model optimization, AI runtimes, agent infrastructure, orchestration, evaluation, observability, governance, data infrastructure, or AI native developer platforms. You should understand model and data pipelines, compute and performance trade offs, production reliability, and the economics of running AI systems at scale.

Strong preference goes to candidates who have built, led, or commercialized reusable AI infrastructure, platforms, or developer tooling that many applications or enterprise customers can build on. We value founders who can translate technical capabilities into differentiated, commercially viable B2B ventures, supported by strong customer relationships and a track record of generating revenue.

Bring the problem you have unfair insight into, the buyers you already know, and the conviction that it should exist as a company. Every venture in this cohort is AI native.

We are building software only, so no hardware, and nothing capital intensive to get off the ground. The industry is yours to pick, but for this cohort we are not considering health or clean tech, which sit with other teams at LG NOVA, so if that is your space this is not the cohort for it.

This is not an accelerator. We are looking for founders who want to build and validate a new venture from the ground up. If you already have a company or a product you are trying to push forward, this is not the right fit.

Who we are looking for

You are a domain operator with deep access to the buyers in your space. You have built or commercialized something real and have raised funding before. People in your industry take your call. Maybe you founded before, maybe you raised before, maybe you ran a business line that behaved like a startup. You move fast when the path is unclear, and you close.

The profile we want

• Founder, repeat founder, or founding executive experience
• Deep expertise and credibility in a specific industry or problem space
• A live network of buyers and decision makers in your domain that you can call on
• A track record of building, commercializing, or scaling something new
• Comfort in ambiguity with a bias toward evidence and revenue
• A clear view on why AI makes your venture buildable now and not three years ago

What LG NOVA offers

You get resources most early founders would fight for.

• Competitive compensation at market rates while you do the work
• A concept testing budget so you can put real money behind proving demand
• A budget of up to $500K to carry a validated idea toward commercialization, setting you up for a Seed round
• Government partnerships across multiple US states that open real doors to pilots, design partners, and first customers
• An LG backed fund that gives validated ventures a direct path to capital, so you are not starting your raise from zero
• Market research, market sizing, and financial modeling done alongside you, not billed back to you
• Engineering services to help you test and build
• Equity in the venture you validated and commercialized if it progresses to a Seed round

You validate. We resource it.

How the program runs

The program runs in two sprints.

Sprint 1 is 90 days of validation. You define a specific high value problem, identify the economic buyer, test willingness to pay, and generate hard evidence that a venture should exist. The point is proof, not a product.

We run this in the open with you. You meet with us weekly to review progress and evidence, and at set checkpoints around Day 30, 45, and 60 we decide together whether to sharpen the concept, redirect it, or stop it. Redirecting or stopping a concept early is part of how this works, not a mark against you.

Sprint 1 ends with a panel review on Day 90. That panel decides whether the venture continues into Sprint 2.

Sprint 2 is around 180 days of building toward venture formation. You move from evidence to commercialization, early customers, and the foundation of a company. If the venture earns it, you become Founder and CEO of a new business built with LG behind you.

What you will do

• Develop and sharpen a venture thesis in a space you know cold
• Run buyer discovery with the people who actually hold the budget
• Pin down the economic buyer, the budget owner, and how they buy
• Validate the pain, the workflow, and the real size of the demand
• Design and test a paid pilot, a design partner program, or an early offering
• Secure concrete evidence of willingness to pay, whether a paid pilot, a signed letter of intent with commercial terms, or a design partner agreement, from a named buyer
• Build the commercialization plan and the business model
• Bring back a recommendation grounded in what the market told you

What success looks like by the end

• A clearly defined venture opportunity
• A validated customer and economic buyer
• Hard evidence of demand
• A credible path to revenue
• Signed design partners, pilots, or customer commitments
• A commercialization plan that scales
• Enough conviction that LG should invest and build

The details

This is a contract, hybrid role based in Santa Clara, California, structured as two consecutive sprints. It is a full-time, exclusive engagement. While you are in the program you are not building, advising, or holding an active role in another startup, including as a passive or part time founder. Your focus is this venture and nothing else.

Compensation is annualized and paid during each sprint.

Sprint 1, the first 90 days, pays an annualized equivalent of $180,000 to $200,000, plus a dedicated concept testing budget.

Sprint 2, around 180 days, pays an annualized equivalent of $200,000 to $240,000, contingent on completing Sprint 1 and being selected to continue into commercialization.

The ventures built here are LG ventures. The work and IP you create during the program belong to LG NOVA, and in return you share in the upside through equity if the venture progresses to a Seed round, and the path to Founder and CEO if it spins out.

We are selecting a very small, highly selective founding cohort for this round, so the bar is high and the opportunity is real. If your venture spins out and you step into Founder and CEO, your executive package, including salary, equity, and other terms, is negotiated separately as part of forming and financing the new company.

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Recruiting Range 180000 - 200000 USD