Full-Time

Founding Account Executive

Updated on 8/1/2026

Pensive

Pensive

11-50 employees

AI-based grading and personalized learning platform

No salary listed

San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

Category
Sales & Account Management (1)
Required Skills
CRM

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Requirements
  • You have 5+ years of closing experience at a software company.
  • You have consistently hit or exceeded quota and can point to concrete wins.
  • You actively automate research, outreach, follow-ups, and deal management using artificial intelligence tools.
  • You are comfortable operating with ambiguity and building process from scratch.
  • You care about education and believe technology should amplify human judgment, not replace it.
Responsibilities
  • Convert high-intent inbound users, including professors, teaching assistants, and departments, into paying customers.
  • Proactively research and conduct outbound sales into new opportunities across universities and institutions.
  • Run product demonstrations and clearly articulate value to different stakeholders.
  • Navigate complex higher-education sales cycles by distinguishing between end users, buyers, and decision-makers.
  • Close deals ranging from single-course pilots to larger institutional rollouts.
  • Onboard new customers and handle early-stage support and frequently asked questions.
  • Act as the voice of the customer by feeding insights directly into product and roadmap discussions.

Pensive builds an AI-assisted grading and personalized learning platform for higher education. It helps instructors by automating grading, generating personalized feedback, creating rubrics, and learning the instructor’s grading style; it can grade handwritten STEM work and essays and provides a course-aligned AI tutor that answers questions 24/7 with citations from lecture notes, while integrating with LMS like Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle. It differentiates itself by scaling individualized support for large classes through AI that mirrors a professor’s grading approach and feedback, backed by pilots at universities such as Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Columbia. Its goal is to cut educators’ grading time by up to about tenfold so they can focus more on teaching, mentorship, and research, while improving student outcomes.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$6.9M

Headquarters

Palo Alto, California

Founded

2024

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Seed funding of $6.87 million supports faster product and sales expansion.
  • Beta usage reached 1,000+ instructors across 100+ institutions and 3 million questions.
  • Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle integrations reduce adoption friction for universities.

What critics are saying

  • Gradescope, Canvas, and Turnitin can bundle similar AI grading features quickly.
  • A public grading error at Harvard, Berkeley, or Columbia will damage trust.
  • University procurement and academic-integrity reviews can slow deployment and force manual oversight.

What makes Pensive unique

  • Founded by Yoonseok Yang and Min-jun Kim in San Francisco, 2024.
  • AI grading handles essays, handwritten STEM work, and instructor-specific rubrics.
  • Course-aligned tutor cites lecture notes and enforces instructor AI policies.

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Growth & Insights

Headcount

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