The Founding Go-to-Market Lead at Phota will create a scalable API business by identifying markets, closing partnerships, and developing sales strategies.
Phota is building the personalization layer for visual GenAI. We started with identity preservation for image editing and generation: letting developers create and edit images of real people while keeping them unmistakably recognizable.
We’re looking for a Founding BD Lead to help identify, develop, and close the highest-leverage partnerships and customers for Phota API, turning early market pull into durable platform relationships
- Build and own Phota API’s early business development motion across AI startups, creative platforms, avatar/video companies, developer platforms, and visual AI products.
- Identify the most promising verticals where identity preservation is mission-critical, including AI headshots, avatars, personalized video, marketing assets, creative tooling, and product photography.
- Source, develop, and close high-leverage design partners, platform partners, and production API customers.
- Run founder-style customer development to understand partner workflows, current technical pain points, buying dynamics, and expansion opportunities.
- Work closely with founders to shape partner strategy, ICP, pricing, packaging, launch plans, and strategic narratives.
- Help build repeatable BD assets, including partner pitches, vertical-specific narratives, demo flows, case studies, integration examples, and launch materials.
- You have experience in business development, strategic partnerships, API/platform sales, developer platforms, AI infrastructure, cloud, creative tools, or applied AI products.
- You are strong at identifying which relationships matter and turning ambiguous market interest into concrete commercial opportunities.
- You can speak credibly with founders, product leaders, ML engineers, platform teams, and business stakeholders.
- You are technical enough to understand API workflows, model integrations, inference, evaluation, developer experience, and production constraints.
- You are commercially sharp and can distinguish high-signal customers from interesting but low-value conversations.
- You are excellent at relationship-building, follow-through, and creating momentum across multiple stakeholders.
- Experience in AI infrastructure, developer platforms, API sales, model platforms, cloud infrastructure, or technical partnerships.
- Experience selling to or partnering with startups, developers, product teams, or technical founders.
- Track record of turning early customer conversations into revenue, references, product direction, or ecosystem momentum.
- Bonus: experience with ecosystems like fal, Replicate, Hugging Face, Modal, RunPod, Together, Fireworks, DigitalOcean, AWS, or similar platforms.
- Bonus: experience with developer relations, product-led growth, marketplace partnerships, or founder-led sales.
- Join at the moment when Phota API is live, working, and already seeing real market pull.
- Help define a new category: the personalization layer for visual GenAI.
- Work directly with the founders on company-defining BD, partnership, and market strategy.
- Own the early BD motion before the playbook exists, from strategic partner mapping to customer development, integrations, launches, and expansion.
Phota Labs San Jose, California, USA Office
San Jose, CA, United States
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