Reach out

People partner to the AI frontier

In AI, the team is the product.

Accelera runs searches and builds people functions for frontier labs, neolabs and the investors behind them. We also publish the research we use to do it.

Start a search See the AI practice
Representing top talent from
  • Anthropic
  • OpenAI
  • Google DeepMind
  • Mistral
  • Cohere
  • Together AI
  • Sierra
  • Cursor
  • ElevenLabs
  • Perplexity

Overview

  • Practice

    Search and people advisory

    Executive and research search, embedded people operations, and advisory for labs and funds.

    The AI practice
  • Newsletter

    The First Move

    Our weekly on the people and capital behind the AI race.

    Read it
  • Library

    How Founders Think

    50 profiles of how founders and leaders operate, drawn from their own words.

    Browse it
  • Capital

    Investments

    We write $10k to $50k checks into companies we believe in.

    How we invest

The market

Three kinds of employer now bid for the same researcher.

Researchers used to choose between a big lab and a startup. Neolabs added a third option and raised the bar for every offer. Where you sit decides how you have to hire.

Frontier labs

Wins onPay and compute
Exposed toSenior people leaving to found labs of their own
Where Accelera comes inSenior research and infrastructure searches. Offer and retention design.

Neolabs

Wins onResearch freedom and founding equity
Exposed toCo-founder churn, and no people function yet
Where Accelera comes inFounding team build. First operators. An embedded people function.

Applied AI companies

Wins onA real problem with real users
Exposed toAn auction they cannot win on money
Where Accelera comes inSecond-circle hiring. Offers built on scope and ownership.

Table 1. Who bids for a senior AI researcher, and on what terms. Source: The First Move, Issue 02.

AI practice

Built for the two hardest hiring problems in the industry.

A frontier lab and a neolab recruit from the same small pool with opposite constraints. We run a different engagement for each.

Frontier labs

Scale the research org without thinning it.

A frontier lab hires from the same five or six companies as every rival, with the same stock story. Budget is rarely the constraint. The constraint is finding people who have done the work before and closing them before someone hands them a term sheet.

Searches we run
  • Research scientists and research engineers
  • Training and inference infrastructure leads
  • Evals, safety and applied research
  • Compiler and systems specialists
  • General counsel, finance and treasury leadership
How we work with you
  • Retained searches for senior research and infrastructure roles
  • A live map of who sits where across labs and Big Tech AI groups
  • Offer design for candidates weighing the founder route
  • Retention reviews for teams likely to leave together
Neolabs

Go from four founders to a working lab.

A neolab raises on its team before it has a product. Every early hire moves the valuation, and so does every departure. Most labs at this stage have capital and compute and no people function at all.

Searches we run
  • Founding members of technical staff
  • Second-circle engineers: evals, data pipelines, inference
  • Chief of staff and first operators
  • Head of people, general counsel and finance lead
  • First go-to-market hire when the product arrives
How we work with you
  • We act as your people function until you hire one
  • Equity and vesting terms that are fair both ways
  • Leveling, comp bands and an offer process, built once
  • Retention planning for co-founders and the early team

Applied AI companies

You will not outbid a lab. We build offers around the problem, real scope and ownership, and recruit the engineers who built the systems around frontier teams.

Investors and institutions

We operate as an extension of VC firms and institutions, serving as their dedicated people function across the portfolio.

Engagements

People management consultants, working as one team.

Search, people operations and advisory from the same partners, for companies scaling fast and the funds behind them.

Executive and research search

Retained searches for the roles that set a company's ceiling: research leads, heads of AI, infrastructure and compiler specialists, general counsel, treasury and the C-suite.

Embedded people operations

We work as your people function, or as an extension of the one you have. Hiring process, leveling, compensation, onboarding and the systems behind them.

Advisory

Org design, offer strategy and retention planning for founders and their investors. We advise on the team you are building as well as the seat you are filling.

Research

We publish what we learn.

Accelera owns and runs two publications. Both are free. One tracks the market we hire in. The other studies the people who build in it.

How Founders Think

Browse the profiles

The operating systems of people who built things that lasted.

  • SituationWho to hire
  • SituationThe technology is shifting under you
  • SituationThe company might not survive
  • SituationIt is time to hand over
50 profiles and 22 situations, each drawn from shareholder letters, memoirs, memos and long interviews. One founder problem by email, on Mondays.

The First Move reads the market.

Each issue follows where AI talent and capital moved that week, and what a founder should do about it.

How Founders Think reads the operator.

Each profile shows how one leader made the calls that lasted, and where that model strains.

The practice puts both to work.

When we run your search or advise your team, we bring the map and the judgment with us.

Capital

We write checks into companies we believe in.

When we believe in a team, we invest in it. The capital comes with the same guidance and hiring support we give our clients.

Check size
$10k to $50k
Stage
Seed
Comes with
Strategic guidance and hiring support

Track record

Teams we have hired for and advised.

  • Alliance
  • Centaur
  • Chaos Labs
  • Clarifai
  • Clearstory
  • Epic Games
  • Hedera
  • HelloFresh
  • Intersection
  • King
  • Known
  • Linera
  • Manta
  • Maple
  • Move Industries
  • Omni
  • Petra Labs
  • Polygon
  • Raiku
  • RemedyMeds
  • Robinhood
  • RunPod
  • Sentifi
  • Sidewalk Labs
  • Spotify
  • Sushi
  • Twitch
  • Two Sigma
  • Uber
  • WeWork
  • Xverse
“Accelera helped us land a game-changing CTO. They understood our pace, culture, and delivered a perfect-fit leader who's already driving real results.”
Sanket Jain, CEO, Gateway
“Accelera consistently delivers top finance leaders for growing protocols. They get crypto, move fast, and never waste our time.”
Madelene Gani, CFO, Hashgraph

Team

Jack Leyden

Managing Director

Leads the firm. Writes The First Move, our weekly on AI talent and capital.

Mo Ahmed

Partner

Co-founder. Talent and capital strategy. Obsessed with helping founders hire and scale.

Mase Latif

Partner

Co-founder. Operations and go-to-market.

Vivian Dang

Partner

People operations.

Contact

Tell us the hire you can't make.

Send the role, the stage you are at and what has not worked so far. A partner will pick it up.